Operabase

Established in 1996, Operabase is the world’s largest opera platform, featuring over 500,000 performances from 900+ festivals and theatres, 50,000 artists, and 85,000 events. Available in 23 languages, it offers opera statistics, season details, competition listings, and maps. Beyond serving consumers, it’s a crucial tool for professionals, with 250 theatres, agencies, and 400 artists subscribed.

understanding the ecosystem

Arts Organizations
Opera houses, festivals, and venues, collectively called Arts Organizations, operate like corporate entities with teams handling costumes, set design, talent hiring, and more. They work in seasonal cycles, typically from September to July, producing grand or small-scale productions.

Productions & Works
A production is based on a work—a story combining music (composed by a composer) and lyrics/script (by a librettist). Productions are collections of performances created by Arts Organizations, either solo or collaboratively, at one or multiple venues. These involve complex processes: casting, backups, set and costume creation, lighting, sound, orchestra coordination, and marketing to ensure a successful season.

Artists
Artists include not only performers (on-stage) but also off-stage professionals like sound, set, lighting, and costume designers, as well as orchestra members. Many are trained in Conservatories and enter auditions to secure roles in productions or entire seasons.

Agencies
Agencies manage artists, guiding them to auditions and gigs while expanding their talent rosters by onboarding new or unrepresented artists.

Opera Enthusiasts
The audience completes the ecosystem—discerning patrons who choose performances based on factors like producers, cast, orchestra, and the venue’s experience, aiming for the perfect night at the opera.

user study

Operabase was in business from 1996, and they had a pretty solid understanding of who their users were, and what they had wanted from the platform. But, we needed and insisted to hear it from them.

Now, due to a major language barrier, we couldn't be a part of user interviews and that was a bummer. But, we instead drafted a series of questions for which we would need answers to across the user spectrum.

For their paid users (a.k.a Opera Professionals) we needed answers to:

• Why they would choose Operabase over other platforms?

• What do they like and don't like about the platform?

• How long does it take them to add a listing?

• How easy or difficult is it to subscribe/ onboard a new user from their organization to the Operabase platform?

• What tools do they typically use in their workflow?

For the B2C users which are the Opera Enthusiasts we needed answers to:

• How do they typically discover Operas to go and watch?

• How do they decide on which Opera to watch?

• What other platforms do they use to keep up with latest updates in the Opera industry?

• What do they like or don't like about the platform?

• What else do they do on the platform?

user classification

B2B Users

An overwhelming response we observed to why they would choose Operabase over any other platform, was it's simplicity of performing data entry tasks over their own websites.

• Rookie Artist

• Pro Artist

• Small Organization

• Large Organization

• Talent Agencies & Agents

B2C Users

• Rookie Opera Viewer

• Opera Season Planner

user insights

Rookie Artist

These were Opera Professionals that are just starting out, they would typically use Operabase as a launch platform to get noticed by prospective talent scouts, or get potential gigs for a performance.

These users typically needed:

• A robust page manager.

• A profile tracker, to view who's looking at their profile.

• A low barrier for entry to subscribe and manage their page along with their peers.

Pro Artist

These were Opera Professionals that are seasoned veterans in the industry. We came across quite a few that were versatile in the roles that they perform, a good example to describe this would be was when we got a response from a 53 year old opera singer. He could switch between multiple voice-types, had enough experience to play a violin or other instruments professionally, and would also perform the role of an opera conductor.

These users typically needed:

• Their profile page to mirror their professional website.

• They wanted to showcase their repertoire. Which is a historical archive of all their performances that they've done and a list of future roles they would be performing.

• They wanted to add multiple roles to their profile, showcase awards and recognition upfront.

• If there was a glowing review about their performance, they would want to highlight that

• These folks are also extremely busy and would have little to no-time to manage their page, so they would want their managers to keep their page up-to-date.

Small Organizations

I've clubbed a few users into this category, these typically include:

• Opera Houses

• Venues

• Festival Organizers

• Talent Agencies

Although these user types differ from each other, they typically share a few common needs that they want from the platform:

• Access to Operabase's vast database of Artist to shortlist artists for auditions.

• A robust page manager, that can help them drive their business through either ticket sales or enquiries for talent representation.

• Ability to reach out to various department heads, to either rent sets, costumes, lights or even backstage talent.

Large Organizations

This would be a similar list of users from the Small Organization list. The only difference from the previous list to this list is, the size of these organizations.

• Opera Houses: These are organizations, that produce an entire opera production from the ground up, this would include building the sets, designing the costumes, and have an organizational heirarchy like a typical corporate MNC.

  
  

• Venues: Most of the venues that host Opera performances are owned by Opera Houses, and they act as home venues for a majority of their production. Apart from this, these venues are typically centers of attraction for the vast majority of the public, or are heritage buildings. So apart from hosting Operas, there also conduct tours, special events for various ages.

  
  

• Festival Organizers: These are legacy festivals that have been running for decades. They function like a typical large opera house, they own a venue or have a long term lease partnership to host their festival. Unlike an opera house with a fixed venue, a festival typically lasts for a few days to a few weeks.

  
  

• Talent Agencies: These talent agencies have a vast number of artists in their rosters, have multiple offices spread across multiple geographies that can take care of their artists when they are performing at multiple locations.

And, for these users the common sets of needs were:

• A page manager that enables them to mimic the level of information on their websites.

• A contact registry to list out key members and their contact details (something akin to a professional Yellow Pages for Opera).

• Ability to list sets, costumes or talent for rent, so that other opera houses could lease them.

• Access to Operabase's database of Artists and their repertoire.

• Ability to claim an Artist page that they represent and manage their pages even if the artist is not on Operabase.

identified problems

Verifying data: Data that gets entered through various entities (Artists, Organisations or Agencies) needs to be verified before publishing. This is critical to the success of Operabase, as most people trust the platform over other websites.

Smoother Onboarding: Converting customers to paid users was a challenge, as they couldn't understand the value of a subscription. This lead to many drop-offs from the conversion funnel.

Subscription Management: Agencies that were managing artists needed a way to ensure that their artists and themselves had access to professional tools.

Robust Page Manager: For all the paid users, they needed a dedicated section to manage their page, check on who's visited their page, and customize it to showcase themselves to other opera professionals and opera enthusiasts.

Ease of Use: The current version of the website was not user friendly, and most of all it was not mobile ready. Moreover, the user flows were not optimized which led to multiple clicks to reach a destination page.

Professional Tools: The tools no doubt were useful for the B2B users, but unusable unless the users were first given a walkthrough on how to use it. Reducing this onboarding time was going to be critical for the platform's success.

improved B2C user experience

Information Architecture: Reducing time to find information by eliminating 5-level navigation to a simple 3-layer model. Helping users get to what they want to consume faster and navigate through the website seamlessly.

Header & Navigation: Redesigned header, with better information clustering to help users make a decision on what section of the website that they would want to visit.

Search Experience: Improved search experience, to help users get to the right pages faster, and facilitate deeper exploration.

Page Layouts: Focused page layouts for each user persona. Through rigorous customer feedback and client interactions, every section of the page is to help the end user perform key actions.

User Registration: Eliminating friction points for users to register & log-in to the application faster. Helping reduce drop-off rates and increasing conversions for paying users.

Homepage: Improved the homepage design, to showcase main feature sets that the end-user would frequently use.

improved B2B user experience

User Registration & Conversion Funnels: Redesigned the entire conversion funnel by examining drop-off points for users. Supported the automation of the conversion funnel through design to reduce activation time of new user registrations.

Profile Switch: Helping multi-account users switch between profiles effortlessly and take key actions like; renewal of subscription plans from the profile menu.

Page Builder: Redesigned the page builder for each user type to enable faster and more accurate data entry by simplifying the design.

Pro Tools: Introduced and revamped some core professional tools like (the Casting Tool, Rentals, and Contact Registry) that Opera professionals use frequently.

Subscription & Checkout: Iterated and tested multiple flows of the Checkout process to ensure minimal drop-offs from the process.

Conversion Funnels: Analyzed and improved conversion funnels to improve growth by collaborating with product managers.