Barnyard Recs Website

Barnyard Recs started off as an initiative by a young musician to share knowledge with other music enthusiasts. Soon, a few of his fellow musicians joined. It was a one-page website on WordPress that offered one solo session at a discounted price, and if you liked it, you could book more sessions. What they had was an MVP of an MVP.

However, it quickly exploded in popularity, and they needed to scale fast. With limited time and resources available, they approached me to build their first proper MVP—a scalable platform that would connect musicians and fellow music enthusiasts.

I had very limited time and a even more limited visual language to work with. I kept their original dark theme and many of their initial design elements and put my focus on User Experience. A new User Journey was created, complete with their original lead magnet of booking the first session at a discount. Users could now easily search their growing library of music instructors across different genres and book sessions with ease. They could also purchase digital assets needed for music production directly from the instructors.

The next challenge was to design the dashboards. There were primarily three kinds of users: regular users who signed up, instructors, and admins. Different roles had different levels of control and permissions. I had to keep the element of familiarity within the dashboards regardless of which role the user belonged to because due to the nature of the site, a regular user today could become an instructor tomorrow.

Putting all that together, I came up with a working LMS for Barnyard Recs in around a month. Now they have a proper MVP with scalability and a good enough user experience to build the next best version.