Liaison
Events • UX/UI • Research • Mobile App
A mobile, event management app designed specifically to consolidate communication from various services and channel them all directly to the you, event manager.
The Springboard
During my design program, my team and I were given the task to research the event management industry. Essentially, we were to build a platform that included event creation, event support, event marketing, venue coordination and/or attendee-focused customer service.
My Role
As a member of a 3 person team on an Agile, 5 week project, I was responsible for:
Performing a competitive analysis and domain research
Drafting and finalizing interview scripts and testing plans
User Sourcing
Conducting user interviews and prototype tests
Creating personas and research artifacts
Designing interactive prototypes
(Left to right) Zarema, Lance, and me
Research
Competitive Analysis
5 direct and 2 indirect competitors
We began our research phase by learning about the event industry domain and creating a very broad competitive analysis.
Though this analysis gave us some statistics, we felt as if we hadn’t received much of a direction from its results. It seemed we set our sights too broad. We were simply unsure of what questions to ask.
Until the user interviews came along..
User Interviews
12 event hosts/managers, 4 SMEs, 2 event attendees
This time, we had a more focused goal. We chose our target audience to be event hosts/managers, and we wanted to answer these 3 main questions:
Day to day responsibilities
Frustrations
Technology (devices and services) used
From those interviews we constructed an affinity diagram in Miro:
The Results
These questions really helped us build empathy with the users, and gave us some of the key insights that truly led the project onward:
Hosts and organizers wish to create meaningful experiences
Effectively communicating with services (vendors and venues) can be difficult and hard to manage
Existing event management tools are often too complex, or have too many features to be easily understood
This is Jason
The Scattered Program Coordinator
Jason slowly fell into place as we were gathering insights from our interviews. Once chosen, he was at the forefront of our mind when designing for the solution.
Problem Statement
“Hosts and organizers need a way to consolidate incoming and outgoing communication in order to streamline the flow of information to the involved parties”
Design Principles
Having identified the problem, we then decided on 3 design principles that would help us the best:
Integrated
Organizers will be able to streamline their workflow through consolidated communication
Visual
Planning parties will have an at-a-glance understanding of their current status and next steps, enabling faster turnaround with fewer mistakes.
Flexible
Enables planners and organizers to expand feature capabilities and scope based on the individual’s or party’s needs
The Solution: Liaison
Liaison Annotated User Flow
Here we have the user flow map of our essential screens and their purpose:
View our prototype
User Feedback
What We Learned
Overall, the users enjoyed the concept of the app and thought it was a useful tool for event planners. However, we did receive mixed results:
Tested with 4 users
100% of the users found the homepage confusing
75% rated their overall experience as a 4 on a scale of 1-5 (5 being the highest rating)
75% could not easily locate important features
The Pain Points
Moreover, there were 2 very consistent pain points users experienced when performing the test:
The home screen was immediately confusing and lacked context
The filtering process was not efficient enough
1. The home screen is confusing
The screen lacked context, users did not know what they were looking at
The iconography wasn’t well understood (i.e. the hamburger menu & floating icon)
Lack of explanation regarding what the hashtags did
2. The filtering process wasn’t efficient
The filtering process was lengthy and redundant
It prevented quick access to the recommendations
Updates
So, we gladly made some major updates to the overall look and organization of Liaison in order to better communicate the purpose of the app:
1. Home Screen
Instead of the home screen being an inbox, we took the user feedback and made the first page a display of the list of events the user would be managing; getting rid of the misleading hamburger menu.
2. Filtering Process
To get users to their recommendations quicker, we added an option for users to apply filters directly on their recommendations page instead of applying all filters prior to viewing their results. We also made the filter menu take up only the bottom portion of the screen to give users the comfort of leaving at any time.
3. Messages
We moved the messages to be contained within the events themselves, as opposed to being the home screen. The user can filter messages by selecting them to see either vendors or venues for that specific event.
Updated User Flow
Final Future Recommendations
To carry this project forward, we decided that the app needed a few more tweaks:
Find a way to define the “create new event” icon so users aren’t guessing what it’s purpose is
Reconsider the use of hashtags for categorization. They probably are no longer needed
Change some naming conventions, for example “Recommendations” may be changed to “Find Services” so that it better indicates what the user can do