EventPlus
Research
Interviews
To support our decision we began conducting interviews with 3 people who had experience planning events. We encouraged people to talk about the events without constraining them to the questions in an attempt to get more information about event planning.
The questions we asked were:
- · What is the name of the event you are planning / have planned?
- · How many people are expected to attend / did attend?
- · Describe the event...
- · Have you planned for this event in the past?
- · How soon do you start planning?
- · What types of things are challenging to plan for?
- · What tools (online or offline) did you / do you use to plan the event?
- · Do you have sub groups/committees to handle different tasks (e.g. PR, finance, schedules, etc)
- · How often do you meet to plan the event?
- · Planner is active, but participators are passive
- · Groups and sub-groups have no meaning other than for
- · searching and categorizing
- · Login/subscribing is essential for any action
- · Option to obtain only one product
- · Non dynamic information
- · Not sorted by your friends and other guests.
If the event had multiple planners we included the following questions:
Competitive Analysis
We went through and listed pros and cons of existing event planning sites like eVite, Event Wand, MyPunchBowl, Planypus, and Facebook's existing application. While we liked a lot of the features in these sites, many of them had features that we found to be pain points:
Ideation
Wireframes
After narrowing our focus, conducting a second round of interviews and having finished competitive analysis, we started creating wireframes for the new application. Using Adobe InDesign, we created our designs based on styles of the current Facebook Events application. In keeping with our decision to make incremental changes to the current event planning and invitation workflow, we added in the new features.
Creating a scenario helped us refine the new event workflow. This scenario illustrates the primary concepts within our website. As previously mentioned, events planned most frequently on Facebook were Parties and more specifically, birthday parties (WaggleLabs 2007). Therefore, we created our scenario of our hypothetical user Mark planning a 21st Birthday party for a friend. The pages we created involved the event creation page, the invitation received page, the main events page and a new post-event page.
Refinement
User Testing
We created paper prototypes for our design ideas and iterated twice over our design ideas. We conducted usability test with these paper prototypes with 3 subjects. We found that items list options on the right and the update on who brings the items at the center of the page felt like a disconnect to the users. The expectation was to show an updated list what the user volunteered bring under the item list. We would have done this, but we wanted to keep in line with Facebook’s visual schema of displaying details about the event on the left and active quick selections on the right. From observing design patterns in class we were more cognizant of these types of consistencies. To remedy this conflict, we highlighted the update that shows up when a user confirms the item he has chosen to bring from the items list.
Click-Through
To connect the different wireframes into a comprehensive experience for anyone who wished to explore our design, we used Adobe Flash to create a partial prototype. We’ve uploaded this onto our project site so people can click through it and get a feel for how this design works and how it varies from the existing Facebook. We used the click-through more for presentation purposes than for design iterations, but given more time we would’ve liked to create a highly functioning click-through to user test on and help validate our design ideas further.