Local venues and guides to help you host your next DIY event
rSource is a crowdsourcing mobile app that allows anyone who possesses unique skills to host in-person events. Connect with local spaces, communities and access how-to guides for tips on creating a successful DIY event.
Timeline & Tools
5 Week Sprints
Figma, Sketch
Team & Role
I worked with a team of 5 UX Designers. My role focused on conducting and documenting generative research and user interviews to define the design system and address user needs via user testing.
Deliverables
Competitive Analysis, Research Reports, User Interviews, Journey Map, Personas, Surveys, Wireframes, Interactive Prototype, App Map, Information Architecture, and Usability Testing Report.
User & Audience
Primary: Amateur hosts with desirable skills in major cities.
Secondary: Curious learners interested in developing new skills.
Tertiary: Independent store owners that want to monetize their space.
Challenge
With the rising trend for niche consumption and DIY projects, our client saw a market opportunity for curious learners seeking new educational opportunities — from cooking to knife throwing.
Problem: Those wanting to host a specialized event within their local community have limited options to connect with curious learners, venues and other local experts.
Task: Create a platform that provides white glove support for local event organizers who need more than just a ticketing platform and want to monetize their desirable skills or knowledge in-person.
Assumptions:
There is a market opportunity to capitalize on niche educational opportunities.
People with desirable skillsets want to monetize their knowledge.
Skills are preferred to be learned in-person vs. online.
RESEARCH
Exploratory Research on Event Planning
Through exploratory research we found that:
84% of organizations believe that in-person events are a critical component for success within any topic.
In-person events are expected to grow at a rate of at least 11% by 2026.
Using non-traditional venues has increased in demand but organizers have difficulties sourcing them because they aren’t conveniently advertised (if at all).
Organizers who have less than 100 attendees have an opportunity to capitalize on trendy boutique spaces while studio and store owners have a unique opportunity to monetize their resources.
Competitors
In our competitive analysis, we evaluated how event planning and education sharing platforms are structured. We learned that the majority of digital tools and offerings focus on planning logistics or feature marketing tools and analytics to increase customer engagement. Each service only targeted industry professionals.
Eventbrite and Zerista were all-in-one white glove services but relied on third-party vendors to handle logistics. Venue coordination is not directly handled by any of the competitors (unless outsourced); it is assumed the user would be sourcing venues themselves and use a platform to import information.
In the education sharing space we discovered that the platforms vary in degrees of autonomy given to the instructors. Skillshare had a set of loose guidelines and objectives for each class and only offered online learning, while Coursehorse had an extensive vetting process for the qualifications of their instructors through their education department and offered in-person learning. They partner with outside studios and universities, to assure quality, reliability, and trust with their users.
EMPATHIZE
Subject Matter Expert/User Findings:
Our team conducted a total of 10 interviews to learn about the planning process when organizing an event and if a platform that provides white glove support for organizers would be beneficial for their next hosting experience. All interviewees were experienced or professionals with different backgrounds - from Event Planning, Boba Tea Making Workshop, to an independent Pilates instructor.
We learned that:
Logistics support vary depending on the event. This makes it difficult to encompass all requirements and requests as it is a case by case basis.
Established or experienced organizers already have strong partnerships with staff and vendors for logistics support and are unlikely to work with new people because it takes time to cultivate trust.
Using a platform that provides white glove services did not appeal to them. However, they did express interest in finding new venues and want to continue building their audience.
Survey Insights:
Our survey was completed by 59 participants with specialized skills ranging from little to no experience organizing an event based around their skillset. Our team wanted to understand their motives, needs and if they had any interest in monetizing their knowledge if given the opportunity.
55% of participants expressed interest in hosting if given some direction and the necessary resources they needed.
71% listed “money” as the least influential factor in hosting a workshop/event, while, sharing passion with others was the top motivation.
Nearly 51% of respondents preferred to have an in-person learning experience while 37% wanted a mix of both.
Guerilla Testing Insights:
Guerilla testing was great for gathering quick insights from store owners to validate our finding from our exploratory research stating an opportunity for independent store owners to monetize their space. I spoke with flower shops, coffee shops and dance studios - most were open to renting out their space given the proper information and necessary requirements.
BRAINSTORM + DEFINE
Making Decisions
At this stage our team was in agreement that we wanted to create a mobile first application because during our exploratory phase we found that 83% of event creators use an event app and are always on the go. We also discovered that the terms “learning” and “teaching” are associated with higher education so it is vital that we dissociate our app from these conventions.
Validated Assumptions:
Research validated the opportunity of a marketplace to share desirable skills if given the proper resources.
Invalidated Assumptions:
Survey indicated that the primary motive for hosting/organizing an event is to share their passion with others. This challenged our clients assumption that their primary motive is to monetize their skills.
Having an all in one platform for white glove services for hosts would be almost impossible to pull off, unless we partner with a 3rd party vendor.
New Discovery:
Store owners want to monetize their space and resources.
With all of our combined data, we decided to narrow our down our users to our survey respondents that had little to no experience organizing an event based on their skillset. We asked ourselves…
How might technology encourage inexperienced hosts to share their specialized knowledge while engaging an audience and providing them with basic resources?
How might technology help store owners monetize their space in a safe and reliable way that fosters trust and local community?
User Persona: Meet Nayha
To kick off our design we began by crafting a persona that best represents our user type. This helped our team align our understanding of our potential users needs.
Click to enlarge
User Journey Map:
Leveraging our understanding of our potential users behaviors from our research and Nayha, we created a journey map depicting common behaviors, thoughts and feelings exhibited by amateur hosts. Doing so helped us visualize which areas were in need of improvement in order to map out potential solutions.
Defining the Problem
To further support our focus and center our team we concluded our problem statement:
“Amateur hosts with desirable skills need a way to connect with curious learners and local venues. Providing them with a specialized platform will give them the opportunity and inspire confidence to share their knowledge through in-person events. “
DESIGN + TEST
Divergent Concepts:
We developed 4 diverging concepts and tested each concept on 9 potential users that would benefit from our platform.
Concept A: Organizers are matched with potential audiences with similar interests or can be matched with venues and resources via crowdsourcing.
Concept B: Allows hosts, users, and venue owners with similar interests to connect through discussions/forums, to build trust and rapport.
Concept C: Users will get a front row seat to the hosting process through video snapshots or live streamed feeds, taking them on the journey from beginning to end. Record, comment, ask questions, and chat with other hosts––all while spreading awareness about your event.
Concept D: Connect hosts to venues and events near your based off of pre-selected interests/passions with the ability to explore new options via the explore button.
Concept Testing Results
User feedback indicated that each concept was either too similar to existing apps such as Instagram, Yelp and Reddit or that they felt like features rather than a concept that could standalone. For Concept A, users were concerned and felt hesitant on how secure it would be and questioned how users would vet each other and build trust. Overall we found that concept A and C were most favorable so we created a Priority Matrix and SWOT Analysis to help our team determine how we can merge the two concepts and how they can be improved.
Priority Matrix: Our completed 2×2 Priority Matrix, gave us a clear idea of what to focus on and in what order.
SWOT Analysis: We decided to use the SWOT model to test the strength of our design ideas. This gave us an unbiased approach to provide a more critical analysis.
Converged Usability Test Results and Roadblocks
After converging concepts A and C, we did another round of user testing with our past participants and found that our users were confused about the coherence and the identity of the app.
Pain point 1 : Difficulty with navigation because it felt too much like Instagram and users tried to subconsciously navigate it like instagram.
Pain point 2 : Pages are too cluttered and difficult to differentiate from each other.
Pain point 3 : Too many features, feels scattered and unfocused.
Tackling Roadblocks
We had one day to iterate our design, we knew we needed to clarify the focus of the app, our application was tackling too many roles. Based on our findings, we concluded:
The app wouldn’t be for everyday use so having a feed of posts wouldn’t be appropriate.
Homepage needs to be restructured.
Simplify design to direct our users attention to their core needs : Venue, Community and Guides.
While working on our final design we recognized that the information architecture was a fundamental reason why our app felt so scattered. Below are some key screens that we updated.
Content Strategy:
Eliminate the feed of posts, tags and anything that didn’t serve a purpose.
Information Architecture:
Tabs to divide our sections: “Venues” , “Community” and “Guides”.
Simplify the bottom navigation.
Emphasizing the search function by adding it to the bottom navigation.
Replacing the feed of posts on the homepage with “Explore” to immediately direct our users to trending guides, venues, and communities as soon as they log in.
One of our initial screens for the “Community” section was packed with information that didn’t have anything to do with “Communities”. This distracted users causing further confusion.
Final Deliverable
Reflections
Having an open-ended project creates endless possibilities but it’s important to always take a step back with your team and remember who you’re solving for and why.
In our case, the line between education sharing and event organizing got blurred as we kept shifting back and forth between the two. We tried to solve for all potential users at once which led us to implement too many features.
As Albert Einstein once said:
“Genius is making complex ideas simple, not making simple ideas complex.”