Event Finder APP
My Springboard UX research & design bootcamp project
Introducing the Problem
When organising social events for friends such as music gigs, arts & cultural events or day trips, I find myself using several different online sources to find out what’s going on where I live, at the moment that is Dublin, Ireland.
Typical steps to book an event can include;
- Facebook event recommendations, I can tag events as Interested and they appear in Facebook Event Listings.
- Google Search to look up specific information e.g. I want to see what a venue looks like, how long it will take to get there or parking facilities.
- Ticketmaster for ticket prices and larger events, but it doesn’t always cater for smaller, local or the more intimate events.
- Independent sites for smaller, independent gigs and events.
- Entertainment.ie for cinema listings.
This process is time consuming and I’m using several different platforms to get to my end goal. The current Entertainment offerings in the Irish market are generally coming from a provider first approach and are not designed for the end user.
The Solution
Introducing Event Finder, Events Near You.
Event Finder is an app with a user first approach. Event listings are customised around the interests and location of the user. Instead of having to use Search and browse through Listings, the user is provided with suggestions and recommendations of what’s on in their local area based on their interests. The initial focus of the app will be on Music and Arts industries.
User Research
The first step of my UX project was to carry out research to validate my idea.
I conducted several interviews and completed research from 30+ users through an online survey across a demographic of adults between 19 to 50 years.
The overwhelming result was that the process of looking for and booking events is laborious and time consuming. There was a clear dislike of clicking on numerous locations to gather information required to make the decision to go to an event. There is a strong reliance on friend recommendations as, some respondents get frustrated with where to look online and rely on friend’s for sourcing social events. Heavy reliance on Google Maps to plan to get to and from events.
Summary of Research Findings:
Competitor Analysis
I chose 4 key competitors for my idea to explore the functionality of existing products and platforms and then use that analysis develop an improved experience in a new app design.
I completed a feature analysis of 4 key apps to establish strengths and weaknesses of features highlighted during the research phase. I included in the analysis: Entertainment.ie entertainment site and app, BandsInTown: Artist & Concert specific app, Facebook Events and Ticketmaster:
Overall, I found that each application had individual strengths, but there were also short comings, which I identified using Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics.
The following is a sample of my analysis:
Facebook Events: Event data built on Facebook feeds can become overwhelming and you tend to browse through lots of suggested events, based on friend recommendations or liked pages. Search function works for some categories only. When I search for comedy in Events I get a good return of options. However this doesn’t work for cinema listings as is a more complex a search return, it returns cinemas or events related to cinema.
Bandsintown: Tabbed navigation makes the app easy for any user to use. Content is organised in a simple structure; Recommended, Friends, Popular & New — simplicity is a key element. The Search icon takes centre stage in this app and I can easily find a specific concert or artist. Search is limited, I cannot search here by venue or genre of music.
Entertainment.ie: Content heavy site, is challenging to find the details. Personalisation is weak and does not address the needs of users today, only TV and Cinema listings can be customised. The functionality to create this customisation is dated and not suitable for mobile users.
From my competitor research, I established the following key features would form an integral part of new and improved Event app:
Search Results: ability to search by any event related keyword.
Event Details: providing the user with event information in one view.
Map Integration: make map a more integral feature.
Change Location: ability to easily change locations and pin more than one location e.g. home, work, uni.
Speed: reduce the number of steps it takes to find and book events.
Empathy Maps & Personas
My next step was to develop personas and gain a deeper understanding of the main audiences for Event Finder. I created three personas using the information I gathered during interviews and from my survey. Each persona describes 3 distinct categories of user: Simon- the active regular event goer. Sara, single and spontaneous who books last minute and has limited time for research. Finally, Olivia the organised user who has family and needs to plan ahead and organise events into their schedule.
User Stories
I then developed user stories for each persona and assigned these to categories; Booking, Location and Social which assisted in development of a minimal viable product. Creating the user stories provided focus for the design process and meant the user requirements remained in focus throughout the project:
MVP
Creating the user stories helped plan the minimal viable product that would prioritise the following key features as part of a first phase of the app design:
- Login with Facebook and Email
- Geo location filter to filter events by location
- View distance to event and option to pin locations e.g. home, work etc
- My events page with personalised event listing
- My events page with event details include: cost, venue, distance and recommendation information.
Booking and location aspects were the main drivers of the MVP. The Social aspect of the app though important would come in the next phase. For this initial phase it was important to get the main infrastructure in place.
Content Strategy
The card sort for Event Finder began by recruiting 3 interested users that matched the users and personas that I previously met during the research phase. I conducted the card sort in person and completed 1 session online. All 3 users categorised the information in similar groupings but with some variations. The feedback on how to label content was extremely useful:
- Venue and Venue Info are too similar Venue is adequate
- About the Show change to About
- Search’ can be overarching and on its own
- Within 50km include more granularity, 10 and 20km. Include adjustable bar.
- Food Festivals, change to Festivals with sub categories Food Festival , Agri Festivals
- Include follow venue or artist
- Share event can be at different levels
- Make Comedy a category on its own
- Use of labels e.g. ‘Relaxing’ ‘Family’ labels in addition to categories
- Ticket Price — callout if an event is Free
- Arts & Theatre, Comedy -Theatre is duplicated, change to Culture
I made note to keep this feedback front and centre in development of the wireframes and it facilitated the site content structure and creation of the Event Finder site map:
User Flows
With the content structure in place, I was now able to map out key user flows, which was a key step in completion of my MPV. I sketched out my user flows first by hand on notebook paper and then created the final user flows using draw.io.
Example of a User Flow completed in draw.io;
Wire framing
Next stage was to Sketch and start designing the actual screens and see the designs come to life. I created draft designs on paper and built the final designs in Balsamiq. The designs on paper were really useful as I was able to quickly iterate sketches.
Sketches of My Events page, where I played with horizontal and vertical card sort designs to see what worked best:
A main user requirement was to have event booking information in once place including: cost types, ticket availability, venue, artist and distance to events. Using Balsamiq, I was able to further refine the paper sketches:
Prototype
Building the prototype allowed me to thoroughly test the user flows for my minimum viable product and test the design elements and content of each page. I developed the clickable prototype using Balsamiq, you can check out the prototype on Balsamiq cloud by following the below links:
User Flow 1: Registered user, filters comedy events for this week and books and event.
User Flow 2: New user email sign up and profile creation and navigation to My Events Page
User Flow 3: Registered users visiting a new location, pins new location, checks distance to event and books event.
There was much iteration based on feedback from fellow designers and from testing the prototype, I developed the following enhancements to the design:
· Completely Removed the tabbed structure (Recommended | Map) from My Events page. I moved the Map to the bottom main menu, creating a flattened, minimalist design. My Events Page now is the main hub of the design, Map, Calendar, Profile available from the bottom menu.
Based on feedback from the Card Sort, Search would remain at the top as an overarching feature.
· Based on mentor feedback, I iterated the Content on the Card Design for each Event listing. I kept the content with fixed character length e.g. Price, Distance to the right of each Card. This gave greater space for Artist, Venue titles which would be of variable character length to the left.
User Acceptance Testing
Now that I had developed my prototype, it was time to carry out a first round of user acceptance testing to validate my designs:
I gathered a small user group of 3 together to test the Event Finder Prototype. For this testing session I use lofi designs in Balsamiq and users were asked to complete the following tasks:
- Sign up to Event Finder with email and set Venue, Music and Festival preferences, navigate to My Events.
- In Event Finder, check what’s on this week for Comedy Events and Book tickets to ‘Good Mourning Mrs. Brown’ at the 3Arena.
- Check distance to events
- Change location to Cork and book Arts & Cultural event
My objective from this test was to test the main functionality of the app, the participants were users who had been previously involved in the research phase and this was their first time to view the designs.
Overall the usability testing was a success and we were able to identify several areas that could be improved in the next iteration. Improvements made as a direct result of the usability testing include:
- Profile creation page — ‘Create profile in under 1 minute’ This sentence needs to be less an instructional and more a guideline e.g. It takes less than a minute to create a profile’
- Make the instructional content across the top ‘such as Verify your location’ , ‘Follow favourite Venues’ larger and more visible.
- Verify your location page, there were some questions if you could see events on this page. Add additional content to make this clearer e.g. Verify home location to find events near you.
- Suggestion to test out different sized fonts and colours for the Artist and Venue names to make these stand out.
- Include description filters e.g. Family Friendly, Over 25’s, Singles as an additional filter bar.
- Add a clickable link to the distance to take user directly to the map view.
- Add instructions on how to pin location.
- Show route on map from Hotel to the venue.
Style Guide & Visual Design
As part of the visual design process, I developed the Event Finder style guide, with bright and energetic colours representative of the brand. Event Finder is a social app and the colours reflect energy and enthusiasm.
Dark Liver is used for typography or key touch points. Pastel red and Quick Silver are used on navigation and menus to create a synchronised look. Baby Powder is a supporting colour used in backgrounds and design elements.
The selected typography is Ubuntu which is clear and minimalist and designed easy reading in app.
Logo
For my app logo I designed a simple target image with circles which is symbolic of the geo radius central to the design of the app and capturing events within a radius. The logo is accompanied by the title Event Finder with tagline Events Near You.
Next Steps
This capstone project outlines the first phase of design of Event Finder as a minimal, viable product. The next phase of the project is to build in the social elements, integration with Facebook and also a free Event Creation tools for event managers and businesses to easily upload event information to the app.
Stay tuned for the next iteration!
Completed by Mary Connolly as part of Springboard UX Design Curriculum.
