the opportunity

Bumbershoot is a music & arts festival that takes place in Seattle, WA over Labor Day weekend. They have an existing app that is difficult to use and does not aid in bringing in more people to the festival. Our goal was to re-design the app to increase the overall enjoyment of the festival goers, thus increasing their likelihood to return as well as bring along other people. 

This is an interesting challenge because it is an attempt to collapse a lot of complicated information into a simple and low-key format. After extensive user research and testing, our design solution settled on a primary focus of up-to-date events scheduling and a robust faceted search.

RESEARCH

We conducted extensive user interviews on 8 people between the ages of 25-35 who have been to Bumbershoot in the past, asking questions on their biggest frustrations while there, their favorite aspects, and to walk through the existing app, narrating their thoughts. 

After discussing our interview findings, we produced affinity and concept maps to seek out the patterns in the sea of data and to solidify our primary persona and app focus. In addition to this, we performed an open card sort (Optimal Workshop) using the current apps filtering system to see if we could glean better insight into how to organize search criteria. 

User Research & Task Analysis, Key Takeaways

• Users do not like too much information presented at once
• Users want to a robust & predictive search to find their needs quickly & reliably
• Users do not like long lines
• Users want a freeform schedule

PLAN

Meet our primary persona, Alex. As a first time Bumbershoot attendee, she is excited to have a reference mobile app to learn about ongoing events, schedule a personalized itinerary and find all venues, amenities and food & drink options throughout the day.

We based Alex on ticket sales data (over 50% of ticket sales historically have been walk-up sales) as well as through our affinity maps and collation of enjoyments & pain points from user interviews. 

DESIGN

The design of our app was the most challenging aspect of this project. Bumbershoot has many different offerings and demographics of festival goers creating a very complex environment to navigate. Knowing this going in, we had to purposely give ourselves tunnel vision and continually pore over designs and ask, "will this solve the needs of our primary persona?" Our secondary goal was to diminish the potential for unnecessary  feature creep--the biggest downfall of the current Bumbershoot app design.

As Team Lead, I led and moderated multiple design studios ensuring we stayed on task with our primary directive. After each set of sketches and wireframes, our team conducted mini user tests to help streamline our future design. We returned to our card sort data to help direct our search and filter flows and continued user interviews to design our three main screens.

TEST

We created our initial design as a clickable prototype in AxureRP. This allowed us to load the prototype onto a mobile phone and test people in a more realistic scenario. While many of our tests were planned in advanced, some of the most valuable data we gathered was from guerilla testing participants on the street. Many of our tests had overlapping pain points and confusing areas allowing us to step back and trim the fat off our designs and prepare for our second iteration.

suggested next steps

As this was a 2-week sprint for a concept, I suggest the following for the V2 prototype:

• Users liked the idea of a carousel of upcoming events, but this needs to be fleshed out more
• Additional card-sorting will help with filter options within the map
• Adding coach marks for actionable features (e.g. creating a schedule) should be implemented & tested