What is 2Step?

2Step was created to allow dancers, choreographers, and performance artists the ability to swap and learn new dance styles and skills while giving a platform to connect with others in the dance community virtually.

Why 2Step?

Problem: As a team of 5 we were given a task to create a front-end prototype within 3 weeks time. We came up with a goal to create an app that would help like-minded people to exchange skills and knowledge. As we have been living during a pandemic and spending much of our days in a virtual world, we wanted to focus on creating an online learning platform to help people trade/swap skills in the user's preferred space.

My contributions: User research interviews, competitor analysis, survey creation and distribution, user persona, ideation, feature prioritization matrix, user flow, user testing interviews, lo-fi prototype, future feature ideation.

How did we land on an app involving dance?

We interviewed 5 participants about their professional and recreational skills. This included a Martech Manager, History Teacher, Factory Worker, Dancer, and Photographer. 

Throughout these interviews we found a recurring theme of the following: 

• Movement is grounding activity for physical and mental health

• Learning new skills are essential for personal development

• Hands on training through visual communication is key

• Social Media is a main source for learning new skills

• Learning and/or teaching on a routine is preferred

These insights led to the exploration of a movement based skill set with dynamic characteristics for educational exchange.

We decided to pursue dance as the movement based skill set that others would be able to share on a virtual scale.

To wrap up our research…

We focused on our user using an affinity diagram and what stood out was the need for routine, the want to learn new skills, caring about fitness, enjoying various hobbies but not finding the time, and preferring taking one class at a time.

The Problem - to expand their craft beyond their own genre of dance and remain exposed to creative expression, experienced performance artists need access to a variety of dance styles and skills to develop new perspectives on movement. 

How might we use a digital platform to provide immediate opportunities allowing performance artists, dancers and choreographers to trade skills in their respective genres and tutor one another, furthering their development and creativity.

This brought us to creating “Jazz“ to showcase the ideal user

Sketches

As a team we each sketched out what we feel would fit best for our app and looked at the similarities and what we wanted to pursue further when creating our lo-fi prototype. It became obvious that we wanted to create an interactive community with an immediate scheduling functionality.