Events2Go

School Project

UI Design

Featured

Case Study

Role:

Project Lead

Timeline:

Sep 7, 2022

December 16, 2022

Software Used:

The Challenge

This project's theme was to create software addressing one of the UN Development Goals of 2022 while adhering to UX development principles taught in the class.

Our team selected the 'Good Health and Well Being' goal and aimed to facilitate event discovery and hosting within the McGill community. Existing apps like Facebook, Reddit, and Google Calendar offered event planning and finding features, but they lacked a dedicated focus on this aspect.

To address this gap, we developed a social-media type app exclusively designed for discovering and creating local events.

Learning Experience

Throughout the semester, I mastered key UX techniques such as user observation, persona and empathy map creation, conducting interviews and user testing, and building paper prototypes. Additionally, I independently developed a complete iOS app from scratch, covering both design and development aspects.

Unfortunately, my teammates fell ill during the course, leaving me solely responsible for the app's design and development. Despite this challenge and the resulting absence of some features, I successfully captured the app's core ideas and functionalities. This experience taught me the invaluable skill of learning and building simultaneously under time constraints, making me a more versatile developer and designer.

🔍 Preliminairy Research

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This project began in the first week of class, focusing on essential UX research techniques: User Observations, User Interviews, Empathy Maps, Personas, and Competitive Analysis.We began by observing individuals using Facebook events, gaining insights into their thought processes and preferences. Participants were encouraged to vocalize their likes, dislikes, and the steps involved in searching for, creating, and joining events. Based on these interviews and observations, we created empathy maps and personas, guiding our usability goals and identifying key pain points users encountered with competitor services.Further, by conducting a thorough analysis of our competition, we were able to identify successful aspects and areas for improvement, providing a solid foundation for our project while also inspiring innovative features.For a comprehensive breakdown of our research process, please refer to our Second Deliverable.

During our user interviews, a recurring theme emerged: participants expressed a preference for the phone app layout when interacting with events. Additionally, some users noted that the app effectively highlighted event cover art, which increased their inclination to click on the events.

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Utilizing our empathy map, we developed three personas—representing potential market segments—who would benefit from using our app. With these personas as a guide, we proceeded to ideate, sketch, and prototype our app.

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🧩 Sketching, Prototyping and Testing

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Once we identified our target market and user-base, we further developed our ideas through sketching. Our next step involved creating a low-fidelity paper prototype, which we tested with selected users to gather valuable feedback on feature preferences and layout preferences.Incorporating this feedback, we proceeded to design a high-fidelity prototype, which we also tested with additional users. For a comprehensive overview of our research process, you can refer to our Fourth and Sixth Deliverables.

We began with a set of initial sketches exploring various layout and card-type ideas. From these initial sketches, we selected 10 promising concepts and refined them into more detailed sketches (middle sketch).

We developed a low-fidelity paper prototype to gather user feedback and test our idea. Although it was my first time using this technique, it helped identify strengths and weaknesses in our designs. While it was more time-consuming than a low-fidelity Figma prototype, I appreciated its effectiveness in evaluating page ideas.

📱Development and Project Conclusion

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After finalizing our prototypes and conducting user testing, I embarked on the development phase alone, as my team couldn't participate. Learning Swift programming and Xcode through online resources took time and dedication.Despite some missing features like map functionality, notifications, and comments, I was proud of my achievement. Within a month, I had learned a new language, mastered a new tool, and adapted to a new workflow. Although my app had some bugs, it still worked! For a detailed breakdown of our Alpha and Beta Prototypes, please refer to our Ninth and Eleventh Deliverables.