EventPass

Background

EventPass, an app from FreeSocialEvents.com, guides residents to explore their city by providing a more cost-effective way to find and attend events. It provides a free access to various kinds of events/activities/services in cities at fair monthly subscription fees. Working in a team of four UX designers in Beginex program, a UX training program that partners and supports real social-impact organizations, I collaborated with EventPass founders on designing an onboarding process that leads new attendees users from browsing a web landing page to signing up on the mobile app.

Understanding business goal

Understanding the business goal through the kick-off meeting with EventPass founders, we realized—

Target users

The target users of the product are primarily the residents who want to enjoy their cities but lack a proper source of information.

Expectation of business for the product

Users can use the product to register, to pay for subscription, to create profile, to quickly pick and book events, to share events, and to help promote the app to their companions. Plus, new users will be permitted to freely join 3 events after signing up.

Learning users’ needs

User research

Interviewing 9 participants who live in various cities in US and love to attend events, we focused on figuring out —

What do they think of the current onboarding experience of other event platforms?
What challenges do they have ever encountered during the onboarding process?
What do they hope to gain after viewing a web landing page?

Through affinity mapping, we concluded our main findings as follows:

Users tend not to provide their personal information before having experienced the new platform.
The onboarding process should be informative and enjoyable.
Web landing page must provide product benefits, features, and price.

The affinity mapping activity

Personas

2 personas were created based on the user research. Here are some priority points that were focused on when we designed the onboarding process.

Maria, career-oriented: needs to find local events that meet her interests.
Dan, socially-motivated: would like to share events with friends.

The 2 user types

Inspiration

Competitor analysis

Examining the competitors, including Fever, Eventbrite, Brandsintown, Meetup, Tinder, Duolingo, and Moviepass, with their web landing pages and onboarding processes, we found—

Web landing page should be informative: demonstrates a website where you can interact, browse and purchase tickets.
Sign up and onboarding process should be intuitive and concise: offers sync with Facebook or Google accounts and options to signup with email; most apps have instructions explaining their special features, collects users’ interests and location.
App dashboard should reflect the personalization: displays events that match users’ interests and location from onboarding.

Design Exploration

User flow

Synthesizing what we understood about users, we brainstormed potential main user flows that meet different use cases.

Prototyping

We prototyped each screens from web landing page to the app onboarding based on the flows—

On web landing page, we highlighted the benefits that users can acquire from EventPass app, told users the process of how to use the app, and listed the featured events provided from EventPass.

The web landing page

In the app onboarding, we had the screens introducing the benefits and allowed users to explore the app dashboard first before signing up to intrigue their interests in the app.

The app onboarding

User Testing & Final Design

Testing the prototype via InVision with 6 participants, we made some main changes based on the results and built high fidelity prototypes—

Web landing page

Web landing page prototype

The information on the landing page didn’t effectively tell what EventPass is and how EventPass works, so we restructured the information to be more straightforward for users to download the app.
Users didn’t know that the service is only available on mobile devices until the end of their search, so we decided to remove signing up process on the web landing page to avoid the confusion that users can join events on the web and made it more clearly that EventPass is a mobile application.

App onboarding

Users found splash screens very confusing. They were distracted by confusing graphics and texts on the screens. We condensed the information to be easily comprehended.
The onboarding process was not attractive enough for new users to sign up. We added active interaction for signing up and emphasizing the bonus that users could get to attract their attention.

reflection

During the 3 months being involved in Beginex program and working with EventPass founders, I broadened my horizon about UX industry that UX designers not only need to achieve users’ needs but to meet the business goals, which was really a big challenge for me. Fortunately, teaming up with 3 great designers who specialize in different areas, I learned and understood the design thinking and process much more deeply. My design abilities and presentation skills were enhanced a lot. As my first real-world project, through which I grew up fast and finally realized what I would like to be in the UX field, I eager to embrace more different challenges since then!

Next: Pratt Institute Libraries Website Redesign

KELLY CHANG .