First and foremost our team goal is to get an A+ on this project. But more than that, we hope that by the end of the project we will have created an intuitive and effective UI design that we can all be proud of and include in a portfolio for prospective future employers. We also want to become more familiar with various prototyping tools, learn new skills which we can take beyond the course and obtain a stronger knowledge of user-centered design concepts and practises.

Map Activity & Events Recommender

Our project is a mobile application available on iOS and Android that will connect event planners with individuals looking to participate in activities happening in their city. The app will display a map of the city the user is currently in, similar to Google Maps, with pins dropped in locations that correspond to activities such as “impromptu basketball”, “secret donut shop”, “city scavenger hunt” and other events. The system will be used when a user opens the application, explores the events happening around them, selects an event to view the location and details, and can click a button to open the address in Google Maps and navigate to the event location. For event planners, they will be able to tap a button to create an event, provide information like the address, time, and description, add keywords that describe the event, and press submit which will then drop a pin on the map for all users to see. The system is meant to be used by any individuals over the age of 18 that have spare time and an interest in exploring the city and participating in various activities. It will also be used by any small businesses or organizations that wish to put together events.

Event Organizers

• Local Buisnesses

  These businesses may be interested in creating unique marketing campaigns that involve customers visiting their location. Examples of this include “Free donuts for first 50 customers” or “Spin the wheel to win a prize, while getting coffee from our shop”.

• City Planners (Government Officials)

  The government may want to organize events such as firework shows during holidays like Canada Day. This app would allow them to design a more robust experience and inform more citizens of what is planned.

• Charities and Non-Profit Organizations

  These organizations may put together charity events and fundraisers with games and activities to entice people to visit and get informed about their mission.

• Everday People

  Our application is really intended for use by anyone who wants to organize an event, whether its something official and formal like a professional conference for a corporation or just an informal meetup between a group of freinds.

Event Participants

• Any local citizen over the age of 18

  As this app is meant to be accessible by everyone over 18, this ensures the safety of individuals being able to check out any events that cater to them.

• Any local citizen over the age of 18

  When a tourist is visiting a new city, they may be interested in checking out local events during the duration of their visit to make the most of their experience.

Ask - Surveys & Questionnaires

The questions were asked to ascertain certain characteristics and understand the users who would be interested in this product. We interviewed 26 people that could be potential users of the application, and we had a large variety of people ranging from different ages, backgrounds, lifestyles, etc. From the responses given, here are a few things that were noticed: The majority of users were not familiar with event planning applications. Many people only go to these events once or twice a week (mainly because they find out about these events from all over the place), and the average person who replied was not a full blown introvert or extrovert, the average was a 7. Doing a survey was very beneficial for our research as it did give us a better understanding of our audience (the average user), we could elicit replies quick and easy, and we were able to distribute the survey to many people. Combined, these factors are what went well for us. What went poorly was there was a misunderstanding with a question. When people were asked how they found their events, they didn’t seem to comprehend the question fully based on replies given. The wording was not clear, leading to lots of outliers. To improve, we could have changed the wording to be more clear and concise so the responders of the survey give more accurate answers. If we did that differently, the better responses would have helped.

Learn - Competitive Product Survey

Pre-existing products were reviewed in order to set a base for which features would need to be implemented, and which features are flawed and should not be implemented in our app. We reviewed four most frequently used event apps. By looking at these apps, we got a better idea of features that would need to be implemented within our system. As many of these competitive products have been around for a long time now, they can be used as a base point to build on and improve products. The features that we noticed that were impressive and we would like to implement and adopt can be found in the appendix. Competitive product surveys were beneficial as they allowed us to analyse, see and experience what similar apps in the market are currently looking like, and help define our own app’s functional requirements. One of the main issues that we encountered during this research was that a lot of apps had overlap, making it difficult to figure out which system or approach would be best implemented. Another issue looking into each product’s functionality and getting the pros and cons was time-consuming. For next time, it would be better if we did the competitive product survey with an audience and asked them questions about it to get more opinions.

Try - Scenario Testing

Three different scenarios were brainstormed to try and succinctly cover and express our application’s possible functionalities. At the same time we tried to tailor each of these scenarios to serve as an embodiment of different potential user perspectives like that of a tourist or small business owner. These were given to six potential users to elicit feedback and it was a great way to get feedback on the different functionalities that we would like to have in our app. In terms of what went well, some of the scenarios got the interviewees really excited about the application as they had either never heard of an event planner app like ours and really wanted to have something like it. The scenarios were good at eliciting more elaboration from some of the interviewees; getting what they thought about the application and based on the three scenarios, the interviewees had a good understanding of the system. Some participants thought that the scenarios were too specific and were confused, so they often needed guiding questions to give proper feedback. Others thought they were too general and they forgot the main functionality of the app and would get lost in them. Next time, we should first use some other more initializing research methods that can inform our scenarios and help us flesh them out better. Finally, having more than three scenarios with a good mix of specific and general cases could help us cover more ground as there seems to be a hit-and-miss for how general or specific the scenarios should be.

Map Activity & Events Recommender

Our project will be an event organization application intended for use on iOS and Android mobile platforms. The application will allow registered users to create, browse and find events in their local area or anywhere around the world. An intuitive and interactive map interface will be central to the app, allowing users to explore and learn about what events are going on in their region or city as well as how best to get there. Event planners will be able to create and work with highly customizable event pages that can be tailored to variable levels of detail in order to provide potential participants with all the information they need to engage in the event. Users searching for an event will have a choice between a robust search system or an active “Event Finder” feature. The Search system will allow users to explore a selection of events in their area based on a variety of search factors such as time, distance, event capacity, event type, organizer profiles and so on. To further enhance the power of the search system, events will be defined and categorized by tags as selected by event creators.

From our analysis, we noticed that most of the tasks were easy to walk through however, there were some confusing icons and labels. Users might not understand what some icons mean such as the filter and event status symbols which would require them to learn and experiment. The user might also not immediately know just by looking which icons are clickable and interactive. We decided to modify this by using common icons like checks and exes to indicate yes and no. In addition, we added colour to certain icons so that green would indicate “good” and red would indicate “bad”. We also found that the ability to do a task in different ways, such as finding an event, was useful. The interface with the map is familiar to most people from apps like Google Maps, and it was intuitive that you could interact with the map and click on events. Compared to our tasks in stage two, we decided not to implement the “passive” and “active” status from stage two as it didn’t seem to match the actual use case of the core event finding functionality.

What went well for this stage was our initial prototyping session where everyone created similar, yet different representations of the app. We all had a great, common understanding of the app’s objectives and this allowed us to have cohesive design elements. It was also easy to collaborate on integrating all of the prototypes together to show our vertical tasks since we used Balsamiq Cloud, though actual integration itself was still a challenge. Furthermore, it was helpful for our group to ask questions to Philmo who helped clarify information regarding the affinity diagrams and prototypes. What went poorly was that we felt slightly crunched for time due to the amount of tasks that were required which didn’t allow us to be as creative as we could have been. The amount of tasks required also led to some time management issues for our time. Additionally, the affinity diagram was hard to understand which made us spend too much time on the early portions of this stage. What we would do differently is to firstly have been more organized with our approach to this stage since there were so many tasks. We could have created a concrete schedule and structure, as well as had more frequent meetings with each other. Secondly, the prototyping portion helped us realize what was feasible and what was overly ambitious for this stage. As a result, we will more closely analyze the feasibility of our ideas in the future.

Map Activity & Events Recommender

Our project will be an event organization application intended for use on iOS and Android mobile platforms. The application will allow registered users to create, browse and find events in their local area or anywhere around the world. An intuitive and interactive map interface will be central to the app, allowing users to explore and learn about what events are going on in their region or city as well as how best to get there. Event planners will be able to create and work with highly customizable event pages that can be tailored to variable levels of detail in order to provide potential participants with all the information they need to engage in the event. Users searching for an event will have a choice between a robust search system or an active “Event Finder” feature. The Search system will allow users to explore a selection of events in their area based on a variety of search factors such as time, distance, event capacity, event type, organizer profiles and so on. To further enhance the power of the search system, events will be defined and categorized by tags as selected by event creators.

Process

The goal of our evaluation was to gauge the usability of our app and find elements in its UI design that were confusing or unclear. We first got a feel for the app and saw how everything flowed. Then three of us individually utilized Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics as a guideline to come up with a scenario and tasks to evaluate our four main tasks for issues and success areas.

Scenario: The long weekend is coming up and Samantha wants to find some new activities to do. She is new to the city and she decides to download Xplore and registers with the hope of finding a dance competition event.

The qualitative part of the evaluation was performing a walkthrough of the system with each of us identifying what we think was a problem. With this, we identified several areas of improvement in the app’s functionality. At this point, the evaluation was subjective, and we had to turn this evaluation into quantitative data. So, we had two testers who rated the severity of the problems from 0 to 4. From those ratings we prioritized the major problems for our next iteration.

Based on the heuristic evaluation, the team will focus on iterating our prototype in this stage by doing the following:

• Implement consistent colouring of buttons and design
• Implement error messages for when the user wants to create an event but leaves fields empty
• Indicate that horizontal scrolling is possible in the manage events sections
• Implement more navigation options so user does not have to always reset

Review and Findings

There were many positive findings but also some major negative ones which needed to be fixed before moving on. The important things to note were that we did not have any issues that were classified as a level 4, which would indicate a usability catastrophe. The usability heuristics ‘visibility of system’s status’, ‘matching between system and real world’, and ‘recognition rather than recall’ had several positive findings that were compliant with the heuristic principles and enhanced the experience with our app. We found that there were plenty of indicators to let the user know what is happening when they do major tasks like signing up for an event, and the familiar icons and simple language made it fairly easy to use the system. Our negative findings lied with the ‘consistency and standards’, ‘error prevention’ usability heuristics. In our iteration we decided to implement consistent colouring of buttons and our main design in terms of layout of the buttons and text boxes. We also implemented error messages for when the user is creating an event but accidentally leaves critical fields empty.

What went well for this stage was how we were able to frequently meet up after reading break to deal with the time crunch. We were able to work around everyone’s schedules and kept in constant communication. Since we worked hard on stage three with our low-fi prototype, we were able to take those ideas and build on them, utilizing them as a foundation rather than starting from scratch. We also reviewed feedback from stage three to better understand the objectives of the stage. What went poorly was that Figma was initially difficult to learn and this slowed down the progression of the project. We also did not use all of Figma’s features effectively which may have led to many inefficiencies during our prototyping sessions, creating more work for ourselves than we needed. We also did not have sufficient meetings early on in stage four and this led to a time crunch near the end which complicated our workflow and stressed us out. In terms of what we would do differently, we would have planned more time to learn Figma by watching video tutorials and using additional online learning resources. We also would want to start our initial meetings earlier in the stage in order to prevent time crunches at the end.

Xplore is a mobile application prototype that allows users to find, create, and attend events happening around them. The purpose of the application is to build a greater sense of community by allowing users to create their own events or attend ones hosted by others. This report showcases our journey as we applied user-centred design principles to bring this idea closer to reality. Our group conducted user research by forming and analyzing surveys and questionnaires, competitive product surveys, and scenario testing. We then used the insights gathered from the user research to create a low-fi prototype using Balsamiq to highlight initial tasks and functionalities. Following this, we used Figma to create a hi-fi prototype that implemented six vertical tasks that were iterated upon based on feedback.

The Design Problem

The problem we wanted to solve was based on the following observation: With many events happening around the city, it is often challenging to track and be aware of the available opportunities. Currently, people learn about events through social media accounts, but this information is spread out and not consolidated anywhere. This is challenging when someone is either travelling to a new city looking for something to do, or is a current resident who wants to learn about events where they can meet new people, and have fun.

The Design Solution

A potential solution to solve this problem consists of a mobile application that conveniently consolidates all events happening in a city that makes it easy to discover events. This way, people can easily access community-maintained pools of knowledge about events rather than having to access disparate sources. This platform would also help event planners to see and manage their events.

Changes made to the Hi-Fi Prototype

For this stage we wanted to give users ways to search for and browse events based on their established event interests. When a user shows interest in an event on the map and clicks on it to get further details, they will now also have the option to view other events similar to that one. We also provided users a quick way to view all of their favorite events from their profile, this way they aren’t restricted to viewing those events on the map or in the calendar view of their event manager. We also fixed a spacing issue that was present in the ‘create events’ section to help streamline the design and make it look cohesive to the other sections.

Future Changes that Could be Made

Some changes we could make include adding additional features to enhance the functionality of our app. One feature we could add is a passive event finder that would actively look for events on behalf of the user based on their interests, notifying them during their daily routine. This would just be a convenience feature that users could use when they don’t know precisely what kind of events to specifically search for or maybe don’t have time to browse themselves.

Future Changes that Should be Made

Some of the changes that should be made to the prototype primarily involve cleaning up how users create events in our application. Currently, when users create an event they must navigate through a sequence of event creation pages where they can only navigate to the next page, previous page, or very first page from where they currently are. This setup could be made more efficient by giving users a tab system that allows them to navigate to any event creation page from any other event creation page. This would also allow us to more easily alert the user to required but undisclosed information by having alert icons appear on the tabs corresponding to pages that are missing information.