Urban Farm
Urban Farm event planning white label app for event venues, allows clients to book and manage services for a single event or multiple events, from anywhere.
Roles: UX Designer, Brand Designer, UX Researcher
The Challenge
Event & Wedding planners are spending too much labor and time on the phone and/or in person planning the various elements of a wedding or event. They need a single hub that can manage all of this.
My goal was to create an app that individual event locations can use to centralize all aspects of planning an event for users, giving them access to cost and detailed planning options in real time, at the tips of their fingers, from anywhere they have access to a computer or mobile device and internet.
Discovery
Research Goals
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What are the processes and emotions that people experience around the problem my product is trying to solve?
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What are the common user behaviors and experiences with tasks that my product is trying to address?
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What are the user needs and frustrations as they relate to the product I am designing?
Focus on the Users
In order to answer the above questions, I needed to find individuals that could potentially be real users of the product I am designing. To find out, I used social media platforms like Linkedin and Facebook to put the call out to my direct connections as well as several groups to recruit potential users/interview candidates. After receiving responses, the main user groups looked to fall into the following two categories:
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Professional Event/Wedding Planners
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Independent self-planners (ex. Someone planning their own wedding)
Demographics for both were primarily female, working professionals, in urban areas.
A tertiary beneficiary of this product would also be event venues that are looking to appeal to the above users by offering streamlined, more convenient event booking options/services.
I designed a questionnaire to gain insight into user journeys and pain points and interviewed 6 participants in real time via zoom and phone calls.
User Personas
After organizing the information gained from these interviews, I was able to identify consistent user goals and frustrations and combined with demographics, developed the following user personas.
Shawn
Age: 44
Residence: Austin, Texas
Occupation: Wedding Planner
Education level: BA
Background: Shawn is a 44 year old wedding planner who lives with her partner and 2 children in Austin, TX. With spring coming and many weddings on hold during the worst of Covid, business is starting to boom again and she needs ways to streamline processes in order to continue the same services without raising fees. She’s been leaning towards venues that can offer assistance with planning multiple wedding needs without having to constantly make in-person visits, i.e. the ability to make arrangements via online/mobile device.
Goal: Find venues that can offer additional service planning assistance via online/mobile app
Frustrations: Busy schedule + Covid means she doesn’t have the time or ability to do as many in person planning tasks.
Cecelia
Age: 54
Residence: Denver, CO
Occupation: Corporate MarComm Events coordinator
Education level: BA
Background: Celia works for a large software company as a MarCom event planner. Celia plans anywhere from 10-30 client and potential client events as well as internal offsite meetings throughout the year. She doesn’t have time in a 40-hour work week to run all over town or even to different states to look into the details of event management, but this far this has been her burden. Celia was in a car accident last year and is still trying to regain mobility in her legs, thus the burden of traveling place to place has become even more challenging for her. She is overwhelmed and overworked and would love to find venues that offer planning services conveniently online.
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Goal: Find a way to arrange events at off-site locations without having to leave her office to make arrangements.
Frustrations: Cannot find event venues that offer planning services online.
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Ana
Age: 28
Residence: Marin County, CA
Occupation: Graphic Designer
Education: BA
Background:Ana has recently become engaged. She loves to plan events and is excited about planning every detail of her elaborate wedding. Ana and her Fiance Darius are expecting 100+ guests. They love the idea of a rustic farm-style venue, and Ana really wants to find a place that can host a band and dancing for this event. She has also recently been promoted at work and has a demanding schedule, thus she is looking for the most efficient, time-saving ways to plan the details of her wedding day without using a planner, as she is keen on managing the details herself.
Goal: Find ways to streamline tasks and save time with her wedding planning.
Frustrations: Busy schedule, lack of venues that offer additional user-friendly mobile planning assistance.
User Journey Maps
Based on my interviews I created user journey maps for two of my personas, Ana and Shawn, based on the journey a user would take to book music for an event.
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Shawn
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Ana
Identifying Pain Points
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Lack of venues that offer additional services to streamline planning.
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Lack of venues that offer a way to ‘self-manage’ events in one central location.
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A need for a way to plan all details of an event from anywhere without having to meet in person or make multiple
phone calls.​
Competitive Audit
I examined specific event venues as well as event planners and event management entities.
Upon review there were 2 product offerings I thought could be beneficial:
1) An app that could be branded for any event venue, which would offer event planners an easy, mobile from anywhere way to book their event, manage the booking, and customize needs for their event, such as catering, decorations, music, floral, etc.
2) An app for event planners where they could plan and manage all of their events and event details regardless of where the event was being held. This app would still likely require a great deal of footwork and in person meetings.manage?
The problem with the second product is that this would not suit the needs of ‘self-planners’. Thus I chose the direction of a ‘white label’ app, which could be rebranded for any event venue that wishes to offer centralized event management for their clients.
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Ideation
As I prepared for the design phase, I wanted to consider, how might we solve these pain points for our users?
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How might we make it easier for users to self-plan all aspects of an event?
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How might we make it easier for users to have insight into services before reserving them, without having to visit these services in person?
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How might we make detailed information and feedback on venues and services easier for users to access?
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How might we make this product something available to users anytime, anywhere?
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How might we make this product easily available to all of our user groups?
Design
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For the purpose of initial product design, I focused on the flow for how a user might book music or entertainment for an event.
Storyboards
I created a storyboard to illustrate the user journey for booking music, and how my app might solve their current frustrations.
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User Flow
Next, I planned out a User Flow based on the booking music for an event.
Early Concepts
Next I began wireframe sketches to plan out the homepage of the app.I wanted to make sure I was address user pain points here before moving into digital wireframes and gathered feedback from users as well as seasoned UX professionals to prioritize hierarchy of information for users.
Wireframes
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Low Fidelity Prototype
Next I built out the initial digital wireframes into a low fidelity prototype illustrating the music booking flow, and then proceeded with our first Usability testing.
Usability Study Findings​
Refining The Design
Revised wireframes and Low fidelity prototype based on User Research findings.
Design Mockups
Preparing for mockups, I wanted to give the app a realistic feel; how would this app look branded for a specific venue? Thus I created a brand for the imagined entity ‘Urban Farm’; a rustic urban event venue.
Below are design mockups for the home page.
Designs for the music booking flow.
Results
High Fidelity Prototype
This working high fidelity prototype of the user flow for booking music was created in Figma. Please have fun experimenting with the user flow!
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Accessibility Considerations
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Colors/contrast were tested through the WCAG website.
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The design itself was made clean with lots of white space, easy to read fonts, and contrast in order to be easy to read.
Next Steps
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Build the app out so that it was fully functional, ex. Catering, etc would be usable and the entire site would work seamlessly together.
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Add Photography to the service options.
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Make the app responsive for use on tablets and PCs.
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