Customer Success

"The depth of the simulation in iRise is better than anything on the market. Optimizing our engineering resources, responding quickly to customer requirements and accelerating time to market were all critical for Fuzz. Rapidly simulating a rich version of the site so we could get artist and fan feedback before we started coding helped us respond quickly to our constituents and deliver what they wanted from the get-go."

– Fred Matteson, Vice President, Engineering, Fuzz

Background
Fuzz is a new breed of music company combining a next-generation music label, a powerful artist promotion platform and a feature-rich interactive community of artists and fans. Fuzz is taking artist promotion to a whole new level, empowering artists to take control of and manage their music careers as a business, connect more deeply with fans and engage fans to connect with other fans to discover, share, review, influence and buy music. The ability to respond rapidly to artist and fan needs, while accelerating time to market, were critical components to the success of the launch and the business.

Challenge
Using traditional prototyping tools or paper-based specifications were not feasible strategies to launch such a complex new business application. Input from artists, fans and industry insiders all needed to be considered and acted upon quickly. These stakeholders would not be able to quickly digest large, text-based documents and give meaningful feedback. The dynamic nature of the content and the complex functionality of the community-based interaction and the Fuzz storefronts demanded a more visual approach. Fuzz turned to iRise and quickly simulated its site in high definition. The resulting simulations were then used to rapidly try different approaches and designs with perspective users of the site. Feedback was immediate and visceral – often an alternative design could be presented instantly in the same meetings, cutting days and weeks off of each development cycle.

Result
Using iRise to visually prototype the Fuzz website/application prior to launch accelerated the entire development process by three months and enabled the company to respond to much more feedback from its customers than it would have otherwise. First-mover advantage was critical to the company and in less than three months; since its beta launch on March 15, 2007, the Fuzz community has grown exponentially. Fuzz bands and users already represent 53 countries, and there are thousands of songs, hundreds of playlists and tens of thousands of private messages, comments, blogs and reviews on the site.