General
Our first question was to establish whether our audience liked rock music. We decided to ask this question as we are both fan's of rock music, and we would both like to do something, based around some sort of genre of rock. Given this information we decided to ask this to make sure our audience felt the same way, otherwise we wouldn't have been justified in producing a promo video, website homepage and DVD cover for a rock band. Our audience feedback suggests that around 70% of our audience agreed with us that their favourite genre of music was a genre of rock. This justifies us in producing a promotion package for a rockband as the majority of our audience listen to rock music.
The above graph represents the results for the question "What is your favourite music genre?". We decided to ask this question as we would also like to know what music our audience listen to, and if that refelcts the previous questions results. These results do in fact reflect the results of the previous question as around 35% of our audience listed 'Classic Rock' as their favourite genre. In addition to this prog, metal and grunge made up around 25% of the remaining results. This means that around 60% of our audience listen a genre of rock music as thier favourite genre of music.
The above graph shows the results for the question "Do you admire your favourite artists image?" This question is important to this media text as the audience register certain links with media texts and their subjects within them. This means that the audience will respond, in this case to the musicians in the media texts. This will include the clothes they wear, the way they style their hair, the way they stand, the way they walk, what they do, or are photographed doing. All of this is important for building a relationship with the audience. Our research shows that around 60% of our audience do admire the image of their music icons, and the people who said they don't or don't know if they do, might not realise that infact they do. For example they may have started playing guitar, which may on a sub-concious level be due to the aspiration to be a guitar virtuoso like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and many others. These results show that it is important for when we create our media texts that audience representation is important, and how we make that link between the text and the user is important.
Website
This is the questionnaire results for the question "Do you like band media players on a website?". It is obvious that our audience really like the idea of having a media player of some description, whether it is a music player, a video player, a pod cast, or a link to a radio station. From this question it is clear to us that a media player is a very important aspect of a website of this kind, one which will definately be included in our website production.
The graph above is for the question "On your favourite artists website, what 5 features did you like the most?". This question was designed to see what people notice in a positive way about the website. The top 5 features where as follows;
Layout, Media Player, Banner, Index, Social Networking.
With this in mind when we come to create our website, we must consider these 5 features above the others, and make sure these 5 features in particular deliver a gratifying text for our audience to consume and enjoy. The layout will be the biggest task of all, as this affects the whole of the website. If the website is too bunched up it will look like we have crammed as much in as possible, but if it is too spread out it will look un-professional and will leave gaps within the website. The media player will have to be big enough for people to notice it, but not too big that it is distracting the audience away from the rest of the content on the website. The banner must be relevant, dynamic and out-standing from the rest of the website, it must attract and hook people into the website. The index must be dynamic, short, but still offer access to the main pages within the website, if we were to create a whole website. The social networking options must offer things such as chat rooms, bulletin boards etc for the audience to take part in.
This is the graph for the question "What 5 features of the website did you not like?". This is in reference to the particular interviees favourite artists website. It is obvious that a large majority of our sample do like their favorite artists website, this may be due to the audience automatically accepting what the website is designed like, but we did receive some good feedback from our research, for example; Our audience thought that some websites are too simple. From this we gathered that we must make sure that our website is interesting and offers our audience a lot to look at, while staying dynamic and not over crowding the page. We also established that the colours must be relevant to our genre (based on our results), in order to interest and gratify our audience. Our media player must be "good". This one will not be relevant to us as we don't need to make our media player work. 20 people said that the web pages are too long. This suggests that we should limit the length of our webpage, and must link pages in, rather than having one long page.
For this question we gave four different options in which we thought were good website examples (some that follow guidelines, such as the rule of three, and others that opose guidelines). These options were represented as images (as screenshots). The results gathered show that 'Led Zeppelin' was more popular and a close second was 'Lamb Of God'. With these results, we are able to determine what people are more interested in layout wise, and so we can learn some important information about these two websites by comparing them and then comparing these to the others (less popular ones) to see what they were missing. We can take this information and attempt to recreate it as one of our own and later incorperate it into our final design.
This question was a 'part two' to the one above, to give us a greater insight to why they chose the choice they did. The results were varied in opinion. However, it was the simplicity that seemed to catch people attention - the 'Led Zeppelin' homepage being a great example of this.
Another common answer was the graphics or background image which gives light and colour to the page. This makes the honepage seem more interesting and attempts to capture attention, keeping an audience.
'What did you not like about your selected website?' the answers from this question will help us distinguish thats pro's from the con's. We will be able to look at the negatives and focus on the positives and try to implement them into our final design. According to the results, people found that their websites were possibly a bit 'bland' and lacked imagination. Others wrote down 'the colours used' - reflecting back on the options we gave them, all the websites were particually dark, using blacks and greys which would not be appealing to everyone. However, because this is orientated around the rock genre and that these colours are commonly assossiated with that genre, we feel that this is the way we should go. Another popular answer was 'over the top' now this suggests that one or more of the websites are quite dramatic and are possibly quite cluttersome, so this answer suggests that simplicity is the way to go.
This question 'What would have made your selected website more effective?' was created purely to get the publics opinion, we thought of this as one of the more important and more decicive questions. 60% of the public answered 'nothing', all in all this answer doesnt really help and perhaps we should have pushed this question a little more to possibly show its importance to the public. Although saying this we did get a few other helpful answers such as 'effects, larger media player, chat rooms and bigger band name'. These answers are fairly easy to put into action and so we did get some important and helpful information from this question just not as much as we possibly could have.
DVD Covers
- This is the second second section of the question and the questions are all related to music Dvd's.
This was a very streight forward question just to begin the second section and keep attention. This questions asked 'Do you think logo's are important on a DVD cover?' and 90% of the public answered yes. Looking at the results its fairly easy to come the conclusion, we need to include a logo on the cover. The benefits to using a band logo is the iconography it gives off. E.g. the Linken park 'triangle style' logo. This logo is so unique and is seen on all their merchendise and its also on their drum skin when they play concerts. This is now known almost 'world-wide' as their logo and therefore brings publicity.
Very similar to one of our previous questions ('Whats your favourite music homepage?'), we used images of four different Dvd covers (Hammerfall, Nightwish, The who and Wolf Mother) and asked the question, which do you prefer? in which 40% answered that they preferred the Wolfmother DVD cover. This showed that this style of DVD cover is the most popular, so we decided we should try and base our DVD design on this style of DVD cover. The second most popular was The Who's DVD cover, which would also suggest that we should try and include some ideas from this design too. The hammer fall and night wish covers were the least popular, so we felt it to be best to look at some of the good points of the covers, but try not to reproduce something similar to this cover as we wouldn't gratify our audience as much as we could with a similar design to the Wolfmother and The Who covers.
After establishing what DVD cover our audience liked, we asked them to point out which elements of the cover they particularly liked. Our feedback from the research will come very much in handy when we come to create our own media text. One thing which the majority of our audience liked was the simplicity of the cover. For example the Wolfmother cover had a landscape image, with the band name/logo. It is a very simple design, but connotes a lot more than what you may initially think. A continuous theme is something which our audience said is something they like. This cam vary from colour, to fonts, to images and logos. It important therefore to keep a running theme throughout all our texts. 20% of our audience said they liked uniqueness in the text. This is something we must consider when producing our text, but must still try and adhere to certain codes and conventions of DVD cover design. 20% of our audience also said that they liked the use of the Union Jack. This is very good for our text design, and the band which allowed us to base our media texts on, Stentorian, make good use of a Union Jack within their logo, which they have also given us permission to use in our media texts. A majority of our audience commented that they liked the colours used in the covers. In the Wolfmother cover they use very dark colours, whereas in The Who's cover it is mainly light colours being used. 10% of our audience agreed that pictures of the band are important, which is something we must take into account when producing our media texts.
Together, we decided that a better question, which would be more useful to us as text designers would be to ask what our audience didn't like about the covers we showed them. Their feedback was as follows. 20% felt that the covers were too plain, and 10% felt they were boring. This is something we need to heavily bear in mind as it is important to get a good balance between not being too plain, and not having too much within one text so that we can deliver an exciting, gratifying text, without making the text feel cramped up. 10% felt that some of the covers were outdated. This is also something which needs to be considered when we produce our texts, so we don't base our text on something which has an outdated look and feel. By far the biggest percentage was the colours used. 60% felt that they colours were bad, so in conjunction with the colours being liked, it shows there is a thin line between a good colour scheme and and bad one.
After finding our what our audience didn't like, we felt it would be a good move to find out what they would have done to make the cover more effective in gratifying them. Naturally a large percentage, 60% said they would do nothing, one comment being that they aren't the DVD cover designer and know nothing about it, but some points were given which indicate a real need to concentrate on these when we design our covers. Colour was flagged as one thing which they would improve, no ways of doing this were suggested. Less boxy was another suggestion, we when we design our media text, that we do put everything in boxes on the page, and make it more dynamic and make it flow. More detail was also pointed out as something which needs attention, but we decided to look at this in a way that they wanted more detail in images, as it is difficult to apply deep detail to a DVD without over crowding it.
Again we asked about our audiences favourite artist as it gives us more texts to look at for when we come to design our media texts. We asked whether they had seen a DVD cover of their favourite artist. 70% said that they had and 30% said they hadn't.
We again, asked what was effective about the cover, and again 70% said nothing was wrong, and it gratified them. 10% said that the font's weren't easy to read, which is a major thing with DVD cover design, as we need to make sure that our audience can read our texts easily. 10% said that a logo should have been included within the DVD cover, which is something to bear in mind, and 10% said that they felt the DVD was too simple.
Promo Video
This section is dedicated to the Music Promo video. We asked some questions which are not featured as graphs to the fact that they would be hard to put in a graphical form.
This question was asked after asking "Have you seen a promo video for your favourite artist". Then we asked "Did you enjoy it". 100% of our audience answered yes to this question, showing that it is very important to a band/media company doing a piece of work like this to make sure that the promo video is very good and delivers very high standards in order to gratify their audience and promote the band.
We asked this question to see what our audience enjoyed the most about the music video. Different shots seemed to be important to some of our audience while sound quality and live footage were considered to be of more importance. This is something which we must keep in mind when we produce our video. The element which struck out as being most important is the effects used in the video. These seem to be very good, and if implemented properly and well into a music video can work extremely effectively.
We then asked what would have made the video more effective. 90% said nothing. The same 10% suggested two thing which could be improved on. This was the intro and the sound quality. The sound quality isn't an issue as we will be using studio recorded songs which are stored as high quality MP3 tracks. The intro will be made in accordance to the feedback we received from our audience.
