Design for an Event Planning App
Problem: Organizing an event is challenging and full of logistics. For this project, I drew from my many years of experience volunteering for a local non-profit organization. The organization is small and understaffed, and are always in need of volunteers to help organize fundraising events. With that comes the task of coordinating large groups of people to help with specific portions of an event, which can be difficult for an already overwhelmed staff. My idea for this app was to create an experience that helps streamline team and task management for events.
Action: To address the problem, I walked through the aspects of volunteer coordination that I know first-hand can be tedious, and thought about how better to organize the process. I created wireframes that laid out a linear step-by-step process. However, once I started creating the prototype, I realized that the app was not working in the way I had imagined. In fact, it was more complicated. My mistake was trying to guide the user through a certain order of steps, when I should have been creating an experience that was not linear. I rethought my approach and redesigned the app reflect more of a true hub & spoke model. I realized it would be better suited for the user to allow flexibility, instead of a rigid linear format. This also alleviated some of the complications that I was running into when adding interactions to the prototype (keep scrolling for a larger image).
Results: The application was rethought and redesigned to allow for better a flow and ease of use. Overall, I think the navigation improved from what I initially sketched out the wireframes. Each of the “spokes” have a series of 2-5 screens that can be accessed from anywhere in the app. The home screen (aka dashboard) shows event logistics, and can be switched to show stats of different events with the result of a drop down selection. The redesign also allowed for future growth and making additions and improvements. Instead of focusing solely on volunteer recruitment and management, it also incorporated some basic event management functionality. The idea was to allow for expanding capabilities.
Learning: The biggest takeaway for me on this project was navigation and content flow. Realizing that I was approaching this project the wrong was a learning experience. I now have a better understanding of user interaction in regards to content flow. Instead of trying to dictate how a task should be completed, I had to figure out how a user could complete a task by taking multiple paths. During the process of creating a working prototype, I also discovered that prototypes can sometimes deviate from the original wireframe due to expanding, removing or finding better approaches to solve a problem.
Below are larger images of the wireframe and design process if you’re looking for a bit more detail. There are wireflows in which I am showing the screens and workflow, and then a more refined version of wireframes show the screen content in more detail. Link to a full prototype is also below.
