Are you on the list?
INTRODUCTION
Are you new to New York? Do you like to attend events but are overwhelmed with the numerous blogs, apps or social media pages you have to visit to know what’s out there? I know I am!
As a collective, my group was tasked with creating a responsive website that solves the above problems of real users searching for entertainment events.
DISCOVERY & SYNTHESIS
Before we jumped into building out the responsive website, we first had to define the term“entertainment.” We did this through a mind map, a quick visual representation of terms and how they relate to one another (you can see ours below).
Once we had a better definition and understanding of the term “entertainment,” we created a screener survey as a means to make sure the users we reached out to fit into our target audience. For this survey, we asked users six questions:
- Where are you currently located?
- What types of events do you like to attend? (concerts, sports, movies, theater, art museum & galleries, ballet, opera, community events)
- How many of these events have you attended in the past 2 months?
- How do you typically find out about events? (online, word of mouth, newspaper/magazines, social media/blogs, promotions or other)
- Rank these terms in order of which is the most important to you for an event: price, location, date?
- How many public events have you organized in the past year?
The survey results we focused on to qualify a respondent for an interview were if they lived in the New York area and if they attended 3–4+ events within the past two months. As a team, we felt this was important because we were creating a responsive website that involved finding events in the New York area, so we wanted our interviewee to represent our target audience. Some of our results can be seen below.
Next, our goal was to create our User Interview Discussion Guide. However, we could not do this until we had created an assumption map to remove as much bias as possible from these questions. Therefore, before we could create the Discussion Guide we wrote down our group’s assumptions of our user.
Our assumptions are as follows:
- User uses online/websites to find events
- User uses word of mouth to find events
- User tends to purchase tickets through theater apps
- User waits for affordable tickets
- User looks for ways to be notified of upcoming shows
- User only attends shows they can afford
- User gets notifications of upcoming events from friends
With a solid list of assumptions, we created an effective User Interview Discussion Guide that would provide a full picture of the current user's experience within our target audience. Once this had been completed, we reached out to qualified survey participants to conduct our user interviews.
From there, we turned our user data into an Affinity Map, a visual description of themes among the users, and eventually those themes into insights.
Now that we had a better picture of our target users, we were able to compile our themes and insights into a persona. Can you say hi to Jared?
Jared is a 32-year-old male who just moved to New York City and misses knowing about upcoming events near him and does not know how to go about finding interesting events. More specifically Jared’s journey of finding an event can be followed below. He begins unsure of where to look for insider knowledge on events and throughout his way reaches pain points, where he struggles to find one location for information on all events that are happening and also for venue details.
As a group, we now felt as if we knew Jared — he became the fifth member of our team!
DESIGN & USABILITY
With Jared in mind, our next goal was to identify which specific features we wanted to hone in on for our site. To do this we created a MoSCoW Map, a method that would categorize each feature by Must, Should, Could and Wont’s, while also measuring the level of Impact and Efforts. The features under must, high impact and low effort and should, high impact and high effort were what we used to continue to build out or responsive website.
Now that our group had a better idea of what features to focus on, we held two Design Studios, a tool we used to foster ideation among our group. We were now beginning to create a solution. As a collective, we decided to focus on the landing and profile pages — each person created rough sketches of each page and then we compiled them into one cohesive screen, creating our lo-fi wireframes. From there, we turned to Sketch to create mid-fi wireframes so that we could test the functionality with our users. When we did this, we expanded our website from only the profile and landing pages to also include the search, event, friend’s profile, log in and add a friend pages.
Due to my Graphic Design and Branding background, we decided as a team to take a stab at naming our product and designing our own logo, as well. We wanted our brand to represent the feeling of exclusivity, loyalty and a sense of community. Therefore after turning to target users, as well as group brainstorming, we settled on the name: on the list.
When it came time for the logo design, we knew we wanted it to be clean and simple, while also encompassing a sense of VIP access, which we felt was represented through handwritten font and the name. The fun part then came for me when I combined two typefaces, manipulating the letters to create a sense of one cohesive typeface. (peep our logo…)
Once we had our logo, we then returned to our mid-fi wireframes and transformed the screens into a clickable prototype for the mobile version, which we then tested on users. Specifically here, we were interested to see if our user could find a highly rated musical, add a friend and then share that event with that friend.
We started off strong! 3/3 users succeeded in navigating to the browsing screen by either searching through the navigation bar or by using the browse link in the drop-down navigation. As well as 3/3 users correctly assumed the home screen trending events carousel would contain events they wanted to preview prior to navigating away to the browsing screen. However, a minor issue occurred when 2/3 users tried to tap the filter tags at the top of the browse page as their first action. Therefore, the users confirmed that having multiple ways to access the browsing function resulted in successfully finding the specific event page.
Now here comes the real struggle — friends? What friends? 1/3 users succeeded in navigating to the profile screen to add a friend. Users were unaware that they could access the profile page through the drop-down navigation bar. Therefore, we concluded that the profile button should move outside the dropdown and into the head navigation bar. We also concluded that since the majority of our users expressed that they did not expect to be able to friend someone, that this feature could be moved to the parking lot.
On another note, 3/3 users succeed in sharing an event with a friend through the event selection screen. Once again proving our design choices fit with our user.
With these suggestions in mind, we then turned our mid-fi wireframes into higher fidelity ones. Once again, we then prototyped the desktop view to test on our users. Feel free to play around on our prototype and get yourself on the list.: https://invis.io/SUU86JH2ZCB
Our first test was to see if the users could find a concert. 2/3 users succeeded in finding a highly rated concert by using the search button in the navigation bar, taking them to the browse page. Also, 3/3 users correctly assumed that the trending event carousel feature contained additional information. While this test was proving to be successful, 1/3 users did not leave the browse page to complete the task. However, our group believes this was more to do with the user's understanding of a working prototype rather than our actual product. Therefore, we scored this test as only a minor issue and thought of this user as an outlier.
Our next test was to see if users could like and share an event. 2/3 users succeeded in liking and sharing a concert event. As well as 3/3 users correctly identified the icons and knew how to use them. However, 1/3 users did not complete the task of liking and sharing the event, although they did identify the icons. Since this was only one user we categorized this as a minor issue.
NEXT STEPS
Overall users responded positively to our responsive website. Therefore, our main next steps are to:
- Build out the map feature so users can find events based on current location
- Expand filters so users can browse events by price range and ranking, rather than genre
With that said, our most important next step is to get you, on the list.!
