Timeline: February-March 2024 (90 hours over 6 weeks)
My role: I completed this project as part of Springboard’s UI/UX Design course. I conducted all research and design as a team of one.
Scope: User Research, Data Synthesis, Ideation, Information Architecture, Low- & High-Fidelity Prototyping, User Flows, Wireframing, Concept & Usability Testing, Branding, Visual Design
PROBLEM
Crew has launched a product that helps people meet new friends through a social user experience that helps them get out and do in-person activities. Friends keep us company through the difficulties of our lives and help us grow, but when people move to a new city or town, fear and social anxiety can keep people from making new friends. The business team has identified a problem in that, on average, only 20% of people who say they’re attending an event actually show up.
SOLUTION
An incentives system that rewards social interactions and event attendance on Crew through gamification.
Specific features include:
One-on-one event buddy matching
Group chat
Event check-in
Incentives system with premium events as rewards
1. Discover
Secondary Research
After digesting the company context and design problem, I immediately got curious about what influences event attendance. Since this project was scoped to 90 hours, I decided to forge ahead with secondary research, since I had confidence that this was a well-investigated topic.
I wanted to find out:
What factors motivate users to attend an event?
What factors discourage or create hurdles for users to attend an event?
What are existing best practices when it comes to preventing event attrition?
Initial Takeaways
Based on various articles by event experts and event management companies, I gathered that…
People attend events for a variety of reasons:
To create social connections (both personal and professional)
To feel inspired by novel experiences
To learn something new
To engage with an interest or hobby
To simply have fun
Fear of the unknown can prevent people from showing up because people don’t want to embarrass themselves (e.g. not knowing if there are required materials for an event or a dress code)
Continued and personalized engagement with users after registration can encourage them to attend by nurturing a sense of loyalty, reminding them of the value of the event, and creating a sense of FOMO
Competitive Research
Crew also listed Facebook, Meetup, and Eventbrite as relevant industry examples. I analyzed them for both UX best practices and pitfalls to avoid as I considered updated user flows and additional features. Here are my key learnings:
1. Make sure the event registration has a clear flow and primary CTA at each step
👍 Eventbrite’s orange CTA button makes it clear for the user what the primary action is on each screen
👎 Facebook has competing CTAs and no clear start or end point for event registration flow
2. Keep upcoming events top-of-mind after registration to encourage attendance
👍 Meetup and Eventbrite accomplish this by adding upcoming events to the home screen after registration
3. Use social proofing to build credibility, create FOMO, and provide validation for registering
👍 Meetup and Facebook provide attendee-related details like number of registrants, profiles, and shared interests
Proto-persona
My next step was to build a proto-persona based on the target user provided by Crew:
32 - 55 years old
Equally split between men and women
Middle class
Recently relocated to a new city
I did this in order to ground my research, build empathy, and guide the upcoming ideation process. Meet Andrew 👇
2. Design
Ideation
Next, I crafted three How Might We questions that were inspired and informed by key takeaways from the research and the proto-persona (Andrew), which also took into consideration core phases in the user journey of event attendance:
I decided that the first round of updates would include the following 3 potentially high-impact features:
I was especially curious to test the impact of the event buddy matching feature since I hadn’t come across it in other events-focused apps.
User Flows
Next, I mapped out three user flows based on high-level user goals that would also include the features I wanted to validate in my first round of user testing.
3. Validate (Round 1)
Before investing too much time into visual design, I developed wireframes to test whether users could complete the red routes in the three user flows, collect feedback on key features, and validate secondary research on factors impacting event attendance. This was a more ambitious round of validation, so I allotted 45 minutes of time with 5 participants.
Initial User Testing with Wireframes
The most significant takeaway was that the event buddy matching feature did not receive enough positive feedback to be regarded as a high-impact motivator for event attendance in Crew, which I’ll dive into deeper detail below.
But before doing so, I want to note that no major errors were recorded when it came to users successfully completing the three red routes. Users also voiced appreciation for the two other key features I introduced — the onboarding process and the event group chat:
However, as mentioned above, the event buddy matching feature, which was developed to serve as a major lever to drive event attendance, received mixed reviews. While users said they were more likely to attend an event if they had made a commitment to someone that they would go, 60% of users voiced hesitation in proceeding with a buddy match, including comments that a 1:1 match was too reminiscent of dating and that it might take them more energy to socialize in this context.
This left me feeling a bit stumped, especially since asking users what motivated and discouraged them from attending events yielded a diverse set of answers, which made it hard to hone in on a feature that could be implemented to effectively address a significant subset of them.
After some additional brainstorming, I decided to try implementing an incentives system for social interactions and event attendance by introducing “Connector Coins” that users could redeem for registration to special events organized by Crew staff so that the rewards would remain in alignment with the purpose of the app.
In order to implement this iterative solution, I first created a Rewards page on Crew.
I also had to update the app’s information architecture to accommodate the additional content.
Users would now see special events by Crew on their home screen
They would also be notified that certain actions would earn them “Connector Coins”
4. Branding & Visual Identity
After some initial user feedback, the next phase focused on developing Crew’s visual identity based on the existing brand personality and attributes to bring the designs to a higher level of fidelity.
Once I developed the visual identity for Crew and drafted a style guide, I was able to efficiently create high-fidelity screens based on my wireframes while integrating feedback from my first round of testing.
5. Validation (Round 2)
Usability testing with high-fidelity designs
Next, I recruited an additional 5 participants for 30-minute remote usability testing using my high-fidelity designs. Since I felt fairly confident from my initial round of testing that users could successfully navigate through key user flows like onboarding and registering for an event, I took a slightly less structured approach to this round of testing in order to observe how users organically explored, understood, and reacted to the new incentives system.
What I learned was that overall, users were excited and intrigued by the system, but also expressed a lack of trust in it.
Some of the lack of trust came from misaligned branding of “Connector Coins.” Users commented that “coins” felt too close to currency, which came off as transactional in the context of an app focused on making new friends.
They also associated coins with monetization and wondered whether they would be asked for their credit card information. In order to address this, I simplified the language to “points” for the time being.
During testing, the majority of users found the Rewards screen in their own explorations, but others required more prompting in order to discover and understand the incentives system. I decided that I could prime users better for the incentives system by adding a “welcome gift” screen in the onboarding flow.
One additional area of feedback from testing focused on the Home screen. Several users commented that the Home screen felt more like an Events screen when they initially landed on it after onboarding.
Taking into consideration that multiple users felt more likely to attend events with people they shared interests and values with, I added a section for “Suggested Crews” on the homepage to balance it out with “Suggested Events” further above.
6. The Final Prototype
7. What’s Next
The goal of this project was to determine what features Crew, an app that helps people meet new friends through in-person activities, should add in order to increase the conversion of accepted invites to event attendees. Through the iterative process of research, design, and validation, I developed features such as event buddy matching, group chats, and event check-ins. Users could earn points for completing these social actions, which could then be redeemed for access to premium events.
If I had time to continue working on Crew, I would focus on continued refinement of the incentives system so users felt clear on how it worked and what the value-add was for them by using better copy, specialized UI patterns, and perhaps implementing a tiered rewards system.
8. Lessons Learned & Growth
This was the first project where I had to juggle elements of both user interviewing and usability testing in one session, which was definitely a growth edge. I learned that I still had some growing to do when it came to refining what questions to ask in order to really hone in on the answers I’m looking for. For example, in the first round of testing, I asked general questions regarding what might motivate or discourage users from attending an event, when that question could have been more laser-focused on events that were specific to making new friends in order to glean more relevant insights.
Another area I was able to grow in was prioritization. I had initially included another solution into my wireframes — small-group events that were facilitated to foster friendships. While I thought this was an interesting and promising feature, I realized that it would be outside of my scope to try to validate and iterate on two solutions in parallel. This forced me to let go of my own preferences and ego, and look to the discovery materials (research and proto-persona) to inform what solution and features to keep iterating on.
Finally, while I was proud of the idea to incorporate elements of gamification into Crew, this particular domain was less familiar to me, so it took additional time to implement it into my screens and user flows. In the future, I’d love to spend more time studying relevant UI patterns in gaming so I can implement best practices more efficiently and continue devising innovative solutions that bridge different sectors.