The Story: Bumbershoot
Bumbershoot was the third concept project that I worked on in General Assembly in a group of four. The project was to design a music festival app. The objective was to make a festival goer's experience navigating through the scheduled events flawlessly. It also focussed on location based services such as food & drinks, amenities as well as locating friends . We needed to develop a 20 screen state clickable prototype made with AxureRP. My team members and I spent two full weeks working on this project . We worked collaboratively througout the project. We also worked individually on different areas and checked in regularly to discuss our findings.
The Team
Andrew Henry
Kat Curtis
Lauren Hamilton
Tracie Sudesh
Our primary goal as a team was to be able to work together and to communicate effectively. We laid out our priorities and did some affinity diagramming on our vision. we set our goals and started working on a project plan and timeline. We delegated responsibilities and took charge of various roles throughout the project. Among the roles that I worked on primarily were the business model, project summary, heuristic analysis, company research, creating the persona, interviews, card sorting with Optimalsort, sitemap, user flow, use case, user story and about five clickable prototypes on AxureRP which were the scheduling page, map filters and find friend filter.
The Process
We worked on Agile methodology with regular scrums and stand ups. We gathered our data respectively and compiled them and went through them collaboratively. By the end of the second day, we had surpassed our deliverables schedule. So we decided to start with the interviews.
We compiled our our deliverables schedule. We decided to start with the interviews. Then we did some affinity diagramming collaboratively.
I created an Optimalsort account and started compiling the details there. I sent them out to my team members and we forwarded to more people.
We learnt so much from the card sorting and from Optimalsort. The dendograms we got was so helpful and we were quite sure what the priorities of the users were now.
Next on our list was to sketch out our prototypes. We all worked on them individually and compared them.
The Challenge
Since Bumbershoot is an annual event, the app is introduced every year at about a month before the event date. Hence, we did not have any reference for the existing app but we managed to see the app for 2015. We then, made our comparative and competitive analysis based on other similar apps developed by the same developer. Outside Lands 2015 had a lot of similarities to the previous Bumbershoot and we focussed on developing our app based on this. The festival apps that were available were quite overwhelming and they had too many features.
The Revelation
Based on our research with the other apps is, we noticed in the map section that, if a user clicks on any particular selection such as restaurants or events, a window appears over the map which blocks your view. I clearly wanted to change this feature. I brought this up to the team and suggested that we should work towards keeping the map in full view while the user is navigating as it is important to see where we were selecting. I kept the focus on keeping the app less overwhelming and to focus on the app as an asset.
The Vision
Bumbershoot was created so that the persona Cindee could have an enjoyable time at the festival. The focus was for her navigate and view information on the on-going events, finding amenities as well as locating her friends. We wanted to simplify the app and make it user friendly. Those user goals naturally fell under and completed business goals. The location service helped navigation easy. This also included the fastest route and estimated time to location. We maintained the colors of Bumbershoot according to the website to keep its consistency.
The Oversight
Although the paper prototype led us to a better hi fidelity design, our usability tests proved that most participants were confused by the icons on the map screens. They wanted to first click the hamburger icon to get to filters and not the pin icon in the top right corner. This led us to make changes to icons for finding and exiting filter screens. Participants were confused in filter screen and on getting back to the map. This led us to remove the back arrow and include a close button for exiting the filter screens.
The Refinement
Our next steps would be to guerrilla test this app. Iterate from the guerrilla testing. We would also like to make edit on the selecting items in the filters as the “X” button seem to be confusing. We would also need to build out adding friends through Facebook. Additionally, we would need to incorporate a more high fidelity, like dynamic panels for the map and zoom features, and finally to create a manageable way for the sort and find for all artist at Bumbershoot.
