UGoing - Mobile App

**Industry**

Local event discovery // Curation apps

**Overview**

This is a Mobile App Design project for a **pre-launch startup** app that will let users find out about cool, little-known events happening in their city! The client business goal is to shake up the event discovery world by creating an event discovery app whose events are populated entirely by users, called “tastemakers”, people that have connections to the world of underground art, dining and music, by showcasing interesting free events that people couldn’t find out about anywhere else.

Project goals

The client wants to be known for showcasing interesting free events that people couldn’t find out about anywhere else.
Create a destination that people would return to on weekly basis in order to find things to do
Allow for events to be populated entirely by users
Well-thought-out user experience, with simple sign up process, events filtering and curation quiz
Monetize the experience with cross-platform advertising

My Role

I was the designer on the team, focused on all the aspects of research and visual design. In this role, I was responsible for:

All design strategy as it related to product
Brainstorming and communicating design’s strategic value
Advocating for design best practices
All user researches
Visual design

The Challenge

The client had ambitious ideas for event discovery but an incomplete picture of who actually use the app. In order to build something users would adopt, we needed to decide who our target audience was.

The Design Process

Getting from the initial client briefing to a successful design.

Step 1: User Persona

I kicked off the entire design process by creating personas. At a high level, these helped to:

Understand our users’ goals, interests, and behaviors in order to focus the product strategy
Check that we were making something for customers and not ourselves
Unite a team from different disciplines (product owners, engineering and marketing) by identifying and focusing on our users

Step 2: User Research

I started by compiling and reviewing data from the user research. That included user interviews, surveys and analytics.

Step 3: Affinity Diagram

Used to create groups and themes from user research data as an effective way to categorize qualitative data.

Step 4: User Cases & Word Brand

Create a list a specific situation in which the product could potentially be used, based on user’s role.

Step 5: Competitive Analysis

A research was conducted to understand what the competitive advantage would be for our App. Popular local event apps were the first source of information for strength and weakness.

Step 6: Sketching & Wireframing (Low Fidelity Prototypes & User Testing)

With careful consideration of our user’s needs, the sketching phase thoroughly etched out all potential iterations and possible features based on previous interviews and research. In depth exploration and testing with the stakeholders and users during this phase is critical to the success of the product.