Happy is a music blog that we've been working with since their inception in 2010. They started life putting on shows in Sydney's Inner West to help shine a spotlight on local musicians, giving them a place to perform at a time when many live venues in Sydney were closing their doors. While they no longer organise gigs, Happy are still highlighting the best new Aussie music through their site and social media platforms.

As their digital partner, we've done a wide range of work for Happy over the past 5 years including branding, illustration and all manner of digital design & development. Most recently we re-designed their website, marking a big step forward for them in terms of user experience and engagement, helping them become the best music blog they can be.

The digital world is constantly evolving, and so are online media brands like Happy. There is always a new idea, a new technology or a new functionality to investigate. So while the site is launched and the design is finalised, we are always working collaboratively with Happy to introduce new features which will propel them even further in their field and mark them as a leader in the digital space.

Steadily growing in both productivity and readership, Happy now boasts over 160,000 monthly page views and over 14,000 newsletter subscribers. It became clear to us that it was time to introduce a more interactive element to the site, which is how Submissions came about.

Why Submissions?
All of the artists that Happy writes about are carefully selected by the editorial team, resulting in consistently high quality content that is both fresh and original. This has earned the blog a stellar reputation within the music industry as well as the wider community. Being regarded as a tastemaker means that the Happy team are constantly getting editorial requests from both musicians and management.

While this is awesome and results in some pretty special deliveries to the Happy office, the team wanted a way to streamline this process. Inspired by Triple J Unearthed, we developed the submission feature which allows anyone to create a profile and submit their music for review.

Features
We've made signing up super easy by incorporating Facebook & Twitter logins, which automatically pull your basic information and profile picture. You can also customise your profile, with options to add:
• A bio

• Your website

• Your location

• Various social media links

Once you're done personalising your profile, you can upload some music. To submit a track it needs to already be hosted online either on a music sharing site like Bandcamp or Soundcloud or as a video on YouTube or Vimeo etc. You simply copy and paste the iframe embed code!
As well as uploading your track, you can also include:

• Images

• A short description

• Social media links, and

• Tags (which are used to filter search results)

The submissions feature has been so popular already that a bit of a guideline has been introduced - if your submission gets 20 or more shares on social media, then one of the editorial team will check out your work. Unfortunately, there's just too much good music being submitted for the team to be able to cover everything!

Beta Testing
The submissions user journey and set of features is the result of careful planning and testing. We formed a focus group of young musicians (the target audience for this feature), and asked them to go through the submission process at key points in the design and development process. This allowed us to find the sticking points in the design, helping us to make it as user friendly as possible.

It was especially important for us to distil each step down to it's simplest form, reducing the margin for error as we need to cater for all kinds of people, whether or not they are particularly tech savvy.

What's Next?
The submission feature is already proving itself to be a huge success, with musicians from all over the world submitting their work. It's led Happy to discover some pretty awesome young artists, which they're stoked about - new music is the best part of their day!

Obviously we have a long way to go, but eventually we'd like Happy's submissions feature to rival the incredible success of Triple J Unearthed, which now had not only it's own website, but it's own digital radio station.

Happy Radio - the name has a nice ring to it, don't you think?