Personal Project
🔸 Timeline: 3 weeks
🔸 Type: Personal Project
🔸 Industry: Entertainment and Media
🔸 Tools Used: Figma, Miro, Notion
🔸 Solo End-to-end Designer
🔸 When I moved to Los Angeles for work, I struggled to find friends and events that aligned with my cultural background. As an Indian, I yearned for a sense of community and connection to my roots, but found it challenging to establish a social circle and discover traditional Indian events.
🔸 Many of my Indian friends who were in a similar situation echoed my feelings, so it led me to wonder… how can I create a social user experience that will help people like me, to find friends and events that make them feel at home?
🔸 DESI PARTY, a mobile app that brings together individuals from the Indian community to enhance their social experience.
🔸 User research was necessary to see if other people felt the same way I do, and to validate if this was a genuine problem.
🔸 I targeted Indians between the age of 18-35 years, and extensively interviewed them to understand their experiences and challenges.
🔸 This allowed me to delve into the mind of a user to capture a user’s feelings, thoughts and actions, which I was then able to map out using an empathy map.
🔸 After analyzing industry leaders in the event discovery space, EventBrite, Meetup and Fever, I discovered they weren’t effective in addressing the needs of the Indian community -
🔹 They don’t specifically cater to the Indian community, so Indian events get lost amongst all other events
🔹 Not all events are fully represented on these platforms, and many Indian events tend to get missed
🔹 Elaborate process to host events on these platforms, which can be stressful and confusing
Layout Decisions
🔸 It was important to keep the user interface simple. I wanted the visuals of events and users as the focal point of the user experience, to create an instant attraction to encourage users to further use the app.
🔸 For the event details page, I ensured that all necessary information was presented in a clear and organized manner without overwhelming the user. I intentionally designed user profiles similar to that of Instagram to provide a sense of familiarity to the target user group.
🔸 Picking the color scheme was a no-brainer - I decided to go with the hues of the Indian Flag to create an instant emotional connection with the users.
🔸 ‘DESI’ is a Hindi word, that’s used to refer to things of Indian origin. It is a well-recognized word amongst all Indians, including those who may not be fluent in Hindi.
🔸 A notable change based on user testing was to remove the disabled CTA to register (indicating that the user had already registered) and replace it with a bold banner on top.
🔸 This was necessary as the disabled CTA caused confusion amongst the users. They could not immediately understand why the CTA was disabled.
In retrospect, I came to understand that a disabled CTA could be misinterpreted as
🔹 An event being in the past
🔹 Too many people have already registered
🔹 Event not being available to the user (Event is only for a select audience)
🔸 Through the use of a bold banner on top, and eliminating the disabled CTA, I was able to provide a clearer and more intuitive experience to the user.
🔹 Use Gamification techniques such as vouchers, incentives for inviting friends to join the app, etc, to improve user conversion rate and other KPIs 🕹️ 🎮
🔹 Include information on Event Info page on how to reach destination through different modes of transport, to make it easy for users to plan their day 🚌 🚘 🚶🏼♂️
🔹 In-app marketplace to allow users to buy and sell event tickets, merchandise and food, in an attempt to create a wholesome one-stop app for all things Indian 🥘 🎟️ 🎁
🔹 Less is More: I had a lot of ideas but limited myself to implement only the MVP, with a clean UI, which was sufficient enough to serve the purpose ✅
🔹 The impact of color psychology and powerful visuals: During user testing, I could see the joy on users’ faces as they saw the vibrant visuals on the splash page, as it immediately reminded them of their favorite events; That was exactly the emotion I wanted to invoke, and to see that happen helped me appreciate the importance of leveraging colors and visuals 🎨 🖼️