Line-Up
screening room
make it social.
Line-Up
Base in the UK, Line-Up is a global event creation platform that allows users to better organize and showcase their events, as well as organize their ticket orders. The platform allows users (vendors & event organizers) to create event listings – their "Line-Up" – for customers to view and buy tickets.
My Role
Device
Year
Tools Used
- User Research
- Research Analysis
- Ideation
- Sketching
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- UX/UI Design
- Visual Design
- Interaction Design
- Web App
- 2019
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Whimsical
- Sketch
- XD
- Google Apps
The Problem
There is currently no user interactivity on Line-Up and it does not promote longevity amongst its users.
The Solution
- Improving team collaboration feature to allow event creator to add necessary individuals involved in the event and to allow for more visibility on the upcoming event, meaning increased efficiency in organizing the event.
- Creating an interactive social feature, this will give event planners and attendees to connect/communicate with each other. To do so, this would involve the creation of profiles, followed and follower lists, and notifications for new events.
- Reorganizing the existing profile layout, and adding in sections that would allow for promotion, connection, and interactivity between all users.
Comparison of the current Line-Up web-app and the changes proposed my team designed.
Competitive Analysis
We looked at other ticketing and event creation companies and what they had to offer their patrons. This gave us a good understanding of what was important to our users and what we could edit out. From here we highlighted the features that were lacking on Line-Up (in yellow) and made sure they fell in line with the design brief we were given. Our secondary plan (in blue) is also based on the brief, but was not our focus as we felt the web-app was our priority and that with the time allotted to us, we felt we should produce something strong in the web-app that could be easily be transferred to the phone-app.
User Interviews
We conducted in-person and online interviews due to the users we needed to collect data from. We looked at 7 professional event planners and 5 individuals that created events for school events or parties. This allowed us to get a handle on various levels of need and experience with event planning and how we would appeal to a wider market of event holders.
User Questions
- Basic info - occupation, age, gender
- What kinds of events have you planned?
- What kind of event planning apps do you use?
- What types of programs or tools did you use to create tickets for events?
- What do you like about the ticket creation app?
- What are some challenges you face?
- What would you like to see on this app that you think is missing?
- If a share button was on the program, would you want to use it to promote to other venues/sellers/promoters? Explain?
The Analysis
Affinity Mapping
From our interviews we compiled our research to an affinity map that showed us a few things about our users and what we were proposing to do:
- Share button should just link to social media
- Needs cohesion between devices and other websites
- Needs a connect or share feature
- Likes the ease of use (simplicity)
- Current applications do not allow for email duplication or marketing
The two highlighted points directly corelate to our brief, confirming Line-Ups' concerns with their costumer's needs.
Card Sorting
First things first, we looked at the Dashboard Line-up currently has on their web-app. Because this is the portal for their users to do what they want and navigate through planning their events. We conducted a card sort with 6 subjects which informed us that the current navigation wasn't intuitive to the users and would need to be reorganized.
The current Dashboard navigation on Line-Up.
User Personas
To enhance user empathy, the creation of personas was used. This also helped us create stories for our journey map and user flows that we were going to do. It helped keep us focused on who we were making the feature for.
User Journey Map
We used a journey map to help show the importance of our proposed add-ons and what it is actually like for users currently to use their current tools to plan events (taking direct quotes from our user interviews). This allowed for a visualization of the stages a user goes through and making their pain points more poignant.
User Flows
The basic pathways users would take to use our features of inviting members to collaborate on an event and if a user wants to edit a section on their profile.
Sketching
We spent about 30 minutes doing sketches of what we planned on doing with the user profiles and event creation pages. This let us visualize and voice our ideas to each other while we were creating the frames. At this point we also were able to delegate what sections of the web-app each of us were going to do. I focused on the social aspect and the interactivity of the redesign: the dashboard, profiles, follower and following lists, and the event lists.
Lo-Fi
Taking our sketches we went on to lo-fi frames and conducted 5 user interviews (3 event planners and 2 attendees), resulting in iterations on our main points. This gave us a strong base to lead into our mid and high-fidelity frames, as well as informing us what we would need and edit out of our designs.
- Creating Event Page
- Calendar is too big
- Highlight the artwork more
- Managing Users Page
- Rename ‘status’ to ‘invite accept’
- Add an online/offline status column to the left
- Profile Page
- Vertical scroll/dropdown for skills is preferred
- Nice to see analytics (don’t want to necessarily read bio)
Mid-Fi
This is where I was able to shine, by bringing our lo-fis into Sketch and designing the pages in a cohesive manner. Getting the chance to design something to this extent excited me, and I jumped at the chance when my group was planning out the roles for each person. This gave me a lot of practice in Sketch and helped me be even more proficient with the program. Due to time, we also did a few user interviews that would help inform our hi-fis and ensure user testing would run smoothly.
Hi-Fi
Because of the user interviews and usability testing we performed during our low-mid fidelity frames, we were able to jump quickly into our hi-fis with confidence. To do so, we kept the colors simple, staying close to the branding of Line-Up, and using the style guide we created to help skin and finalize our design.
Iterations
Once we completed the prototype in Adobe XD, we continued with 6 subjects to complete a usability test which resulted in the following feedback:
- Change the “* = required” to just “* required”
- Make sure that all the items on the profile pages are aligned
- Include a map or make event’s artwork bigger to fill space on event details page.
- Add social media icons under the Post Settings of the event creation/editing page
These changes were minor and were easily fixed, had we not done earlier testing this phase of our design would have taken much longer than planned.
A/B Testing
We also completed 2 A/B Tests because we had a few design ideas we were unsure of.
1. Deciding the order of 'title of job' and 'place of work'.
- Resulting in 11 out of 12 (91.7%) in favor of 'title of job' before 'place of work'.
2. How it should the selected state should be shown when on a sub-menu in the Dashboard.
- The simplified version was selected by the majority of users polled.
Demonstration of how an event planner would use our newly designed Line-Up web-app. This demonstrates how to create an event, what is on their profile, how they can view their lists of followers/followed and how they view another users profile.
Demonstration of how a user who is an event attendee can view an event planners' profile, view their analytics to inform them and to follow them. Then it shows a proposed means of how they will be notified when an event planner they are following plans a new event, resulting in the purchase of a ticket.
Impact
We believe that with the upgrades to the Line-Up app that there would be an increase in users, as well as a way to keep them interested in the site. By implementing the interactivity of a social media style profile and interaction, it would add to the familiarity for users and make using the site easier and more enjoyable than the current tools available.
Where I See This Going
Due to time restraints the mobile app had to take a step back as we thought the focus should be with the web-app. We believe that because of our upgrades the mobile app could easily follow suit with our changes and be able to be fully integrated. Also, because of the time allotted we have many more ideas that could be implemented in future iterations.
- Mobile app full integration
- Have ‘create new event’ button on the home screen
- Implement commenting feature on event pages/profiles
- Have an improved user onboarding system
- Implement event reviews
- Include a toggle for public vs private events on event creation page
- Have an easy share link on event creation/details page
- Have disclaimers (ie. have alcohol, age restrictions, or public or private events)
My proposed change in how to onboard new users. Adding in the 'Interests/Types of Events' section allows for users to tailor how they want to be marketed or how they want to look for events near them. I also added the 'Location' section, while in the current onboarding system, it comes much later in the creation of an account and is not accurate (typing in Toronto and being shown a map of Montreal).
What I learned (Challenges)
Working with a design brief of an existing company gave me an insight on how to conduct myself when working in a professional setting. It helped me focus and keep to a strict plan. As a whole my project partners and I learned that during user research, we could not go ahead with our proposed plan of action of interviewing event planning professionals, as it would have required scheduling appointments to see them. Therefore, we had to email our questions and hope for the best. The resulting information was helpful but could have been much stronger if we had longer than two weeks to complete the project. Another issue I had faced was trying to settle on MVPs with my group as we had opted to try and solve many issues with our redesign, rather than just focusing on one major feature. This hindered us by a day in the design, but we eventually found our footing and we were able to push forward a product that I am happy to present.
Storyline Strategies Participant App
