Omakase
Event Planning • UX/UI • User Research • Mobile
A mobile app that lets you get personalized event recommendations, save time looking for things to do, and spend more time having fun
Intro
Omakase is a startup based in Houston, TX whose goal is to rid people of the endless, scrolling content and multiple filters when searching for things to do and replace it with recommendations solely meant for us. Matt, our client, proposed that the solution was to create a dual filtering system for recommendations. Users would select their interests upon onboarding, then proceed to the homepage to break their recommendations down further.
The client proposed this solution, but ultimately left it up to us to determine:
1. The effectiveness of their solution
2. Any other possible solutions
3. Other, undiscovered pains points of our users
Project Details
Project Duration: 4 weeks
My role:
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Client Relations
Team Size: 5
Methodology:
Research target audience to gain understanding of current activity-searching habits
Empathize with users, create user personas, and define the problem
Ideate solutions and converge designs into a usable prototype
Test prototype and iterate changes
Research
Our overall key insights from the research are as follows:
Users desire an “all-in-one,” customizable resource to search for and book activities
Users did not like an overwhelming amount of information; i.e. the endless scroll
Users want to share their plans with others, as well as have the opportunity to see what others are doing
Very few other products in this domain actually offer personalized recommendations as options and instead force the users to start from scratch every time they begin searching for something to do.
Many people utilize social media, search engines, and word of mouth recommendations to discover activities around them.
Competitive Analysis
We initiated our research by doing a competitive analysis with this goal in mind: to find what event apps aren’t doing
The Result:
50% of the event apps we researched don’t offer personalized recommendations. In fact, only 2 of the 4 that offered personalized recommendations were direct competitors (NightOut and StubHub)
User Interviews
We followed the competitive analysis up with a series of user interviews. With the insights gathered from those, we created an affinity diagram on Miro (we like to save paper.)
The diagram encompassed so many insights that we needed to break them down into 3 large, overarching categories:
How I choose my events
What information I want to see
Social sharing
How I choose my events
Takeaways:
Social media and direct internet searching is how most people find their activities
Pricing is a major factor in choosing what to do
What information I want to see
Takeaways:
Users prefer an event app that shows a wide variety of activities
Users do not like an overwhelming amount of options when trying to find something to do
Social Sharing
Takeaways:
Users don’t often seek events/activities that are far from their community
Users very much like to share their plans with others, and often trust word of mouth recommendations when considering things to do
Meet Maria
The busy, social professional
Through every phase of research, we were gathering the pieces of whom we believed to be the best representative of our users. With several iterations, we came to Maria, the driving force behind all of our design decisions from this point on.
The Problem Statement Defined
“People like Maria need a way to consolidate personalized event recommendations so that they spend less time browsing for something to do.”
The Design Principles
Knowing that we needed guidance in our designs, we chose these 3 principles based on key user insights:
Comprehensive
Provides and extensive selection of information on events for a complete and detailed one-stop solution
Social
Keep users engaged with one another by sharing feedback and collaborating their plans
Personalized
Event recommendations specific to each user’s preference
The Solution
Our Prototype
So, guided by our principles, we meshed our user insights into a prototype. Upon testing, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive from both the users and our client.
Tested with 8 users
75% (6 users) said they would actually download and use this app
All tasks were rated 5/5 on ease with a 100% completion rate
View Prototype:
Key Screen Breakdowns
Onboarding Interest Selection
Following our personalized design principle, we gave users the chance to select their favorite interests in order to have their recommended options displayed for them on the home page.
Main features:
Preselected interest options (in a final version there would be plenty more options)
Direct search for a particular interest
An option to add more types of interests
Home Screen
Here, users can browse their personalized recommendations and then proceed to apply further filters to help categorize their options.
Main features:
The Omakase sponsored events
Filter by activity type, labled ‘Moods’, as well as filters for price, location, and distance
Short list of interest-based recommendations
Creating/Sharing Albums
To adhere to our social design principle, we created something that allows users to have the ability to create a shared album to collaborate plans.
Main features:
The ability to name the album anything you’d like
The ability to invite your friends to collaborate on the album
The option to make the album publicly viewed (though not edited by the public)
Buying a Ticket
Guided by our comprehensive design principle, we knew we needed to include a ticket purchasing system.
Main features:
Selecting ticket type/price
Selecting ticket quantity
Selecting the date (if applicable)
A continuation to the payment type/confirmation screens
Final Thoughts and Future Considerations
Room for improvement?
We of course received some critical feedback from users and our client, so we took to the drawing board to provide our client with 3 ideas for future use based on the following suggestions:
Change some naming conventions:
The term “Album” caused users to think of collecting photos rather than organizing activities. One recommendation was “Itinerary,” but we believe further testing is necessary.
The term “Moods” did not accurately describe the activity filter, so we suggested changing “Moods” to “Activities”
2. Update the profile and add more options for social sharing
We updated the profile to include more robust options and expanded the bottom nav to include “My Feed.” Based on earlier conceptual ideas, we were interested in including a live feed where your friends can post reviews about their experiences at a particular place. This was meant to generate further recommendations for the users based on trusted word of mouth.
3. Include price comparison:
Another suggestion from our client, Matt, was to put less emphasis on extra fee transparency and replace it with a price comparison feature.
As a team we are proud to have created Omakase, and we are proud to share it with you.