OUTINGS
I. Discovery
Overview
OUTINGS is an events & activities app that prioritizes the event-goer’s satisfaction every step of the way.
From event discovery & purchase, to communication & reporting, to transit & navigation, we’re optimizing the end-to-end experience and energizing folks about their next outing!
Role
User Research, Interaction, Visual design.
Year
April 2022
Research -
My work began with conducting a competitor analysis to assess the core actions of event discovery and ticket purchase with established apps. In testing, I documented what worked well, the pain-points I encountered and pain-points I could foresee others encountering, and functional desires.
I tested Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Facebook, Instagram and Meetup.
After assessing my own experience, I conducted user interviews to learn about others’ approach to and experience with event discovery and ticket purchase. This revealed their behaviors, pain-points, challenges, motivations and desires for discovering events and purchasing tickets. It also surfaced their experiences in attending said events.
The interviews were structured around six topics:
Demographics
Interests & Involvement
Discoverability
Tools
Event Experience
Accessibility
See User Interview notes for insight into my approach and the questions asked.
II. Define
III. Develop
IV. Deliver
Empathy and Affinity Maps -
After conducting user interviews, I created a empathy maps to outline and organize what the interviewees were saying, thinking, doing and feeling.
From here, I generated an affinity map to identify and organize the insights into themes: Event Discovery, Ticket Purchase, Event Communication and Motivation. With this, the pain-points and opportunities began to clarify.
Empathy map
Affinity map
User Personas -
Based on the research and identifying different user needs, motivations and preferences, I developed two User Personas.
Brainstorm Solutions -
Based on the research and activities, I identified the top five problems and brainstormed solutions.
In learning that users would like more communication, both pre-event and at-event, I circled back to research the features available in the competitor apps.
Further Research -
While researching competitors’ communication tools and ruminating on an interviewee’s comment about real-time event notifications, another established app came into view to consider: Wayze.
Their mission of community-sourced travel information and their reporting toolset became inspiration for the OUTINGS app.
Information Architecture & User Flows -
This carried me into drafting the app’s Information Architecture and two user flows: the registration flow and the reserve & assign flow, one of the app’s core value props.
Information Architecture
User Flow: Registration
Sketches -
Once the core solutions and feature-sets were defined and the IA outlined, I sketched the user flows.
User Flow: Reserve & Hold
Wireframing -
Once the flows were outlined and sketches drafted, I began designing the app, starting with Lo-fidelity wireframes and then Hi-fidelity.
Style Guide -
Mood board
Colors
Prototype -
UI Library
Through this project, I learned the power of user interviews, understanding others’ experiences and how that can completely shift the ideas you had for a solution. Also, how exciting it is to get a suggestion from an interviewee that you hadn’t thought of, further validating the importance of user interviews.
Additionally, the challenge of implementing color palettes in that the colors might look great in the style guide, yet once translated to the device, they may not interact well.
Learnings & Next steps
Learnings —
Begin designing the Reporting feature where attendees crowd-source helpful information at the event.
Developing the rewards system; actions that earn reward points and how to redeem rewards.
Community - The social component where the app connects users via DM who have attended the same X number of events in the past Y months. This will be an opt-in feature, fostering in-person community, and friendship around similar interests.
Next Steps —