Cultivating a Event Mircosite — Austin City Limits Festival
Scope of One-Week Sprint
This week’s sprint, we were tasked to create a responsive microsite for desktop and mobile devices of an event. The client is asking for a microsite with a one-year life cycle — it will be stored in the main platform’s archive after this period. We will focus on defining the three stages of use: pre-event, during the event, and post-event.
With over 450,000 attendees each year, Austin City Limits has always been rooted in tradition. The festival consists of two consecutive three weekends. ACL Fest provide a multi-genre music experience inspired by the music series, Austin City Limits on TV. Festival lineup artists who have played at the festival consisted of Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Cure, Arctic Monkeys, Guns N’ Roses and many others famous names.
Lean UX
Starting the design thinking process; we are going to dive into the lean UX canvas. Identifying the user, possible problems and services ACL provides will give us the edge we need. With the lean UX canvas, one outcome we wanted to influence for ACL Fest was to increase their price to quality ratio. We are aiming to get there by filling in the gap making the overall experience for festival goers.
Competitive Analyis
Looking into direct and indirect competitors will give us an insight to weakness and strengths in the current industry. ACL Fest offers an array of genres when comparing music festivals. I found that ACL Fest had little to no information on their current website while competitors were all set up for the year to come.
User Research
I conducted four interviews and several surveys with people who have attended music festivals in past and that enjoy live music events overall. I was looking to hear more about what motivated them to choose the event over others. Another interesting insight was to hear what they loved about the events. That question always seemed to bring out their frustrations during certain stages of their process.
Key Insights
- 93 percent of surveyors were motivated to attend festivals based on the lineup.
- 70 percent of surveyors visited the website first to find out more information.
“Music festivals are some of my favorite events, but I usually can’t find way around.” — Justin
“Knowing the lineup is a great way to plan ahead so you don’t miss your favorite artist.” — Adam
Defining
Affinity Map
I organized all of my data into an affinity map that show the research data and responses throughout the pre, during and post phases of the event. This helped me identify the behaviors during the event such as event venue sites. Specifically breaking down the lack of information throughout most event festivals. Another pattern that arose was knowing the lineup before the event. These trends will lead me into matching pain points with pain relievers.
Value Proposition Canvas
When building a value proposition canvas, I start with the customer side and list down the patterned pain points throughout research. I then start to build out pain relievers for each note listing in customer pains. A map of the venue would help those users that had trouble finding their way around. Another was to connect the users with the lineup through social media and even curated playlist for the event.
User Persona
I then had clear understanding of our user group. The primary person is Erik who finds it difficult to look up event information on festival websites. He is motivated by discovering new music and listening to favorite artists. This user understanding allowed me to emphasize and focus on those user needs.
Journey Mapping
To get a better sense of our customer’s motivations, needs, and pain points, I created a customer journey map as a visual representation of user’s process. Mapping Erik’s journey through the even allowed me to think of design opportunities such mapping out the venue. Also thinking about after the event, we could make a gallery and video page relieving the need of connection after its over.
We take those problems and turn them into how might we statements. We wanted to improve the lineup page, help users locate stages and vendors, and experience the event after it’s over.
By brainstorming, it helped me take those ideas and organized into priority categories that will help me solve the user pain points. In the order of importance, I organized features such as lineup info with social media and bio stories.
I then worked on establishing a sitemap and user flow. I went about mapping the existing website and adding the respective pages that pertained to the minimal viable product. This allowed me to see how to prioritize links through the site. I mapped out the how the user may go through the site before, during and after the event. It now allows for users to view lineups and get to know more of the performers and even re-watch some of their favorite sets from the event.
Lo-Fi Prototype
I started the initial design of sketching some screens on paper to see how it might flow and ended up transferring it to invisionapp. This allows for a better visual when testing. Following the user flow, I wanted to focus on creating a flow to the lineup page with multiple user clicks. Since ACL Fest is two weekends, I tasked the user to flow into weekend two of the event. This will bring into the lineup page. With the stage, it was tricking. I knew it needed to be in mobile as the user obviously not going to bring a laptop to the event. I tested the lo-fi in order to get user feedback on the process. After reviewing I knew needed to get back and fixing some of the user issues when moving into the mid-fi.
Mid-Fi Prototype
Adding the details needed into the mid-fi, the overall design started to come together. I personally enjoy the mid-fi as it makes more sense to me, perhaps because I am a designer. The feedback was all rave reviews but now looking back it, there is good amount of room for improvement. Overall, the structure of the mid-fi was very straightforward and easy to follow. I focused on creating the correct sizes and format to bring into hi-fi.
As a designer, I understand how brand visual are important to refine into solid definitions. We started by looking competitors and understanding design on a brand level. Moodboards is a great tool for just the task. Pulling images, colors, type… basically anything visual gives you the aesthetics of the brand.
Moodbaord + Atomic Design
I have never testes a mood board so to say I was surprised by the results is an understatement. I had written down a few brand attributes I was trying to covey. When testing, I asked others to say how they feel and asked for emotions. I used their responses to bring that vision into creating a style tile. The style tile will hold the colors and fonts to create the brand, website and mobile assets.
Hi-Fi Prototype
Bring the mid-fi into my hi-fi was no brainer. With the style tile and a detail structure already created, it was only a matter of marrying the two. Like any marriage, it takes work. Because the users are going to be using mobile, the microsite needed to be responsive.
Checkout the Hi-Fi
Metrics
In order to measure the success, the microsite features one important question is… does the user find I useful and will they use it. This will give ACL Fest clear insights on how to improve. Maybe shift some of the features to better meet the needs of festival goers.
Key Learnings
Some key takeaways this sprint was to carefully comb through the UX research process. A wise man told me to think of the tools like glasses. Each tool gives you a different perspective of the overall picture. Another takeaway is to bring in the metric mindset. Every apart of design thinking is used to bring insights. Metrics is only based of numbers but can be whether its useful or not.
Something to think about.
