Musica Viva

Overview

Musica Viva, a Sydney-based arts non-profit, wanted to leverage digital technologies to provide a more seamless experience for the teachers and students they interact with daily. They also wanted to upgrade their platform to perform better and be more secure as part of an overall user experience upgrade.

Through technical, strategy and coding audits, we identified problems and created a roadmap to roll out solutions.

Problem

Enhance their digital platform to provide a more seamless experience for the teachers and students.

Solution

Developed a roadmap to fix the issues of their existing platform and improve the platform’s capabilities

Results

User satisfaction rates increase to 80-90% and have received some really positive anecdotal feedback.

The Challenge

Musica Viva is a non-profit dedicated to making Australia a more musical place. It is the world’s largest presenter of chamber music, reaching over 360,000 people directly each year. Musica Viva also helps improve educational outcomes for children by bringing live music to schools around the country. 

They wanted to make music easily accessible to teachers and students through the use of digital technology.  Musica Viva developed an online platform where teachers could access online resources tailored to the live performance, including ready-made lesson plans for up to 10 weeks. Students and teachers can also access interactive music activities, video demonstrations by the musicians, and much more.

While the promise of the new online platform was exciting, they faced a number of issues with the first iteration. After experiencing some performance issues and a desire to build new interactive features, Musica Viva reached out to us to see if we could bridge the gap between the promise of technology and the reality of their current platform.

The Solution

The first and most important goal for Musica Viva was to ensure the platform was functioning correctly and securely. 

After an extensive review and audit of technology, strategy and code, we developed a roadmap to fix the issues and improve the platform’s capabilities. Over the next 12 months, we rolled out fixes to functionality and security and implemented features that should’ve been available from day one. In the next phase of the project, improving the teacher and student experience was top priority. 

Teachers needed flexibility in adding content to the platform but the content management system was originally built in a way that didn’t allow for any flexibility. The CMS is now ‘loosened up’, allowing admin users to customise the arrangement of content within the platform. 

For student logins, the existing process required each student to be individually imported and assigned an email login. It was a manual process and incredibly time-consuming.  We took this issue and developed a simple process, using a single classroom login determined by the teacher which eliminated the need for manual import and creating a seamless experience for students in the classroom.

These content and UX improvements flowed into a redesign of the overall look and feel of the platform. Our in-house team designed the new look in consultation with Musica Viva’s education and marketing teams.

Musica Viva have been really pleased with the results so far. They’re already seeing user satisfaction rates increase to 80-90% as a result of the first phase of development and have received some really positive anecdotal feedback after releasing part of the second phase of development.

We’re proud to have been the right partner for the passionate and impact-driven team at MS Research.

Wrapping Up

We’re passionate about helping organisations like Musica Viva make the best of digital technology. Whether it’s starting from scratch or picking up and improving your existing web applications – our experience with the NFP sector and expertise in digital solutions means we can deliver robust technology that enables seamless experiences.