Venue Village
Venue Village is a space that connects local event organizers seeking a space to host their event with local venue owners.
Project Overview
Challenge
Find a solution that helps ease a common problem faced by event organizers: Finding a suitable and available venue to host their event.
Solution
An online platform that serves as a marketplace for event organizers to find local venues with space to host various kinds of entertainment events together. This serves to build business relationships while enriching the local community with shared activities.
Role:
Time:
Task:
Tools:
UX/UI Designer
6 weeks
Build a mobile ready website
Figma, iPad Notes, conferencing software
TLDR: For a brief overview of this case study, follow the Case Study Deck. I highly encourage readers to continue reading through this page too!)
Research
My focus was much more broad upon beginning the initial research phase. I knew event organizers faced many challenges while planning events so I wanted to gain a clearer insight into those challenges so I could better ideate over a solution to ease their pain.
TLDR: If you’d prefer a design research presentation that covers the research process from a research goal to solution discovery, please see the following Design Deck.
🌟Assumption Made!🌟
With some anecdotal evidence from being connected with folks who host events, I assumed that the issue I may want to address was how to allow event organizers to more accurately and effectively reach their events’ target audience thereby improving event success and attendance
Research Goal
I started the research process with this statement as my North Star:
“I want to learn what current event organizers do to reach their intended audience as well as other potential pain points in their planning process, to understand where possible digital solutions may lie.”
Inspired by this goal, I kept a few objectives in mind as I conducted my research.
Determine what platforms are used for advertising currently
Determine any alternative methods used for advertising
Determine how an organizer determines their audience type and size
Understand how organizers prioritize their planning needs
Learn of any other pain points in the event planning process
Market Research
To gain insights before diving into user research, I started with market research, with a focus on looking at sites that already provide some support for event organizers to post and advertise their events to the public.
User Research
With this initial research, I was getting a clearer understanding of the arena I was stepping into. However, as someone without experience hosting my own events, I knew it was critical to have conversations with those who have such experience under their belt.
🎙️Participants
Age:
Location:
Background:
25 - 35
MA or RI
Experience in organizing entertainment events (music, dance, gaming, light shows)
🌟Key Decision Made!🌟
To narrow my scope, I omitted events such as weddings since they seemed to have their own sets of niche challenges and for the desire to focus on events that served to build, nurture, and sustain communities locally.
Define and Digest
Empathy Map
After conducting interviews, I could see my initial assumptions being strongly challenged. When synthesizing the raw data leveraging empathy maps, I uncovered interesting findings and saw patterns emerging.
Themes Discovered:
Desire to begin or to strengthen a community
Passion for hobbies
The challenge in finding suitable venues
Difficulties finding sufficient staffing
Ensuring enough time was available for all pre-event activities
Collecting necessary equipment
Reaching the intended target audience
Acquiring reliable headcount
User Personas
Leveraging primary and secondary research, I developed two user personas to continuously be used to ensure that design decisions were focused on the user. Let me introduce you to Stephen and Jules.
Key Design Challenges
How Might We Questions
“How might we motivate event attendees to pre-register for events they may be interested in?”
“How might we help event organizers find reliable staffing to decrease the load on a single organizer and increase the likelihood of event success?”
“How might we connect event organizers to venue owners to ensure a proper event-to-space pairing?”
“How might we help community-focused event organizers reach their intended audience?”
Design
The Design Solution
Based on the themes uncovered and our target users, the options for possible design directions were narrowed to the following:
Platform similar to Eventbrite:
Niche entertainment audience
Intra/inter-platform advertisement
Natively integrated feedback capability
Platform to connect event organizers with venues and facilitate business relationships
Rather than trying to create a platform that would be a direct competitor with several, already market-established solutions, such as Eventbrite and Facebook’s Event page, it felt like a more engaging design challenge to explore option #2, where there are many well-established names in that space.
“A platform to connect event organizers with venues and facilitate business relationships”
This design solution has 2 different user groups.
Event Organizers seeking a space to host their events
Venue Owners interested in utilizing their space for events
🌟Key Decision Made!🌟
For the scope of this case study, we are focusing on our user, the Event Organizer.
Task Flows
For an MVP product, I wanted to ensure that 3 things could be done on the platform.
A user can search for a venue
A user can contact a venue
A user can post their event as an open call to participating venues
Low-Fi Wireframe Sketches
Putting all the information together, I built out some initial low/mid-fidelity wireframes. This served as a roadmap on how task flows could be created.
Color/Branding Decisions
Since I was focused on developing an application that catered to entertainment events, the darker ambiance with elaborate stage lighting inspired a darker color scheme with a splash of brighter colors. This gave a modern feel, along with the use of clean, san serif font.
Testing
Sketching to Prototype
To ensure that design decisions along the way were usable and addressed the needs of my users, I made sure to get the eyes of my users on an interactive prototype of my design solution.
Utilizing the prototyping functionality within Figma, I built a prototype I could put in front of my usability testing participants.
User Testing Overview
Method:
Age:
Duration:
Tools:
Task:
Remote, moderated testing
26 - 30
~18 - 25 minutes
Figma, iPad Notes, conferencing software, screen/audio recorder
Completing MVP Task Flows
Pain Points
Upon completing the user interviews, I compiled a list of the pain points experienced by my participants and a number that signified how many of the users brought the issue up during the testing session. I prioritized revisions based on how frequently a particular issue was raised and those with a higher impact with lower effort.
Open calls to venues should be a menu option (5)
Including time and clarify date range for message forms (3)
Clarify pricing scale - per hr vs per room (3)
Option to indicate if the event is one-time or recurring (2)
Add arrows for photo carousel (2)
How much advance notice is needed - set up/break down (2)
Filtering should option should be first step when looking at a long list (2)
Loading Zone vs Parking (1)
Showing event type, category (1)
Name of venue staffer you’ll be contacting (1)
The image should also open map (1)
Reflections & Future Road Map
Future directions for further work:
Build out screens for Venue Owner experience
Include a more fine-tuned venue filtering capability
Incorporate payment process within the application (this would be how the platform generates revenue)
A few challenges that were faced through the process are as follows:
Scheduling difficulties/time conflicts with participants
Limited time
Prototyping with Figma free tier
Honing skills within prototyping
These challenges point me in the direction of where to hone my skills.