From Mood to Dancefloor

The opportunity

People do not always begin their search for an event with a specific artist, club or festival in mind. Often they start with a broader intention: I want to dance this Saturday, I want something queer-friendly, I want techno but not something too hard, I need something under EUR30, or I want somewhere close to home.

Product challenge

How might we help people find a music event that fits the night they want to have? The challenge is to make discovery feel personal and useful without forcing users through a long questionnaire or an overwhelming collection of filters.

Intent-to-decision journey

• Intent: the user starts with a desired feeling, social context or experience rather than a specific event.
• Exploration: the user sees events, venues, artists and promoters that may match that intention.
• Evaluation: the user checks whether an event fits their music taste, atmosphere, price, location, timing and audience expectations.
• Coordination: the user shares options and aligns with friends without needing a full social network.
• Commitment: the user saves an event, joins a waiting list, adds it to a calendar or opens the official ticket source.

Research questions

• How do people decide which event to attend when they do not know the lineup?
• Which factors create confidence or hesitation?
• How important are genre, atmosphere, crowd, venue and promoter?
• When do users browse alone and when do they decide with friends?
• How do users assess whether an event feels welcoming, safe and worth the price?

Product principles

• Start with experience, not inventory: understand what the user wants to feel or do before showing a large catalogue.
• Explain recommendations: users should understand why an event appears and be able to correct the system.
• Preserve user control: personalisation should assist discovery without hiding alternatives.
• Support social decision-making: sharing and lightweight coordination should not require a public feed.
• Measure confident decisions: time spent browsing is not automatically a positive signal.

MVP scope

• Included intent-based entry, event recommendations, recommendation explanations, event detail pages, saved options, shareable event picks, official ticket-source links and basic product analytics.
• Excluded public social feeds, direct messaging, user-generated reviews, full community profiles, in-app ticket marketplace, dynamic ticket pricing, gamification and complex loyalty programmes.

Experimentation plan

• Intent-led entry: compare genre-first discovery with mood-and-context entry using relevant event detail opens as the primary metric.
• Recommendation explanations: compare recommendations with and without contextual explanations using engagement, saves and user-reported trust.
• Event comparison: test whether side-by-side evaluation improves progression to an official ticket source.
• Shared event picks: test whether lightweight voting improves group decisions without requiring a messaging product.
• Availability reminders: test user-controlled reminders with opt-out, complaint and notification fatigue as guardrails.

Product and technical trade-offs

• Personalisation versus privacy: behavioural and location data can improve relevance, but users need consent, controls and explanations.
• Exploration versus decision speed: showing more events may increase discovery while making it harder to choose.
• Commercial ranking versus user trust: sponsored visibility should be disclosed and should not silently override relevance.
• Social usefulness versus infrastructure: group coordination can create value, but public feeds and messaging add moderation before the core problem is validated.
• Recommendation accuracy versus cold-start friction: more onboarding questions may improve relevance but reduce activation.

Trust, safety and inclusion

Music event decisions involve more than genre and price. Users may care about accessibility, venue policies, community focus, safer-space information, age restrictions, facilities, late-night transport and official ticket sources. The product should avoid unverified safety claims and attribute information to organisers where possible.

What this exploration demonstrates

This concept demonstrates how an ambiguous customer intention can become a defined product opportunity, a mobile-native decision journey, a prioritised MVP, product hypotheses, controlled experiments, success metrics and visible technical and commercial trade-offs.