WE ARE ALL JUST PERSONAS HERE
Design Challenge: Meetup, a widely used platform for people looking to make social and professional connections based on similar interests, is looking for design ideas to add new features to its mobile app. Meetup currently has two main user profiles.
Profile 1: *Members, free subscription, are able to find and join groups as well as attend events.
Profile 2: *Organizers, fee-based subscription, are also members. In addition to member features and privileges, may also create events and invite other members to attend. They also have the option to charge members to attend their events.
Could there be a third user profile? Is this user already in the on the platform? What has been until now, a peripheral user, *Hosts. Venue hosts who hack the system and use Meetup to find and contact event organizers to offer their facilities. Is there a potential to improve the Organizer’s experience by having a more complete set of event organizing features within their app. And if there is a potential to add this profile and features to the existing product, is there a revenue opportunity for Meetup to allow Hosts to list their venues?
The challenge kicked off with a screener that gave us a pool of interview candidates we could gather some behaviors and insights from. The search for event organizers and venue hosts: (a) someone who organizes events and knows the struggles of finding venues, or (b) a venue owner/manager who understands the struggles of continually finding events to fill their space.
Challenging dynamics of hosting events and venues:
Event organizers and venue hosts have a difficult time finding and connecting with one another
Event organizers cannot easily find venue details (capacity, amenities, cost, times available, restrictions).
Once the connection is established, communication breaks down and vital details can be missed or miscommunicated.
Once the data was culled, it became clear that in order to demonstrate the new app. we needed two new personas that could walk us through this project. The personas were essential in creating the redesigned Meetup app and product features.
Meet Quinn and Ben
Ben and Quinn are an event-planning match made in heaven, but they just don’t know it yet.
Designing for Ben & Quinn
Being able to apply these crafted personas to our design, gave the project focus. Knowing who the design was for, gave the design direction and the process of creating began with a design studio. Four design sprints that funneled our ideas down into what eventually became our feature list.
What was both a fantastic guide and a bit of a handcuff was basing this work off an existing company, whose brand and style are well established. While we are adding new features, I KNEW we MUST adhere to the brand’s style and current features. We never want to alienate current users or deviate too far from what is working for them. Admittedly, I felt a bit like a dictator in the group when designs were created that opposed this. I would ask, “Is that how Meetup does it?” Or “Does Meetup have that flow? If so, what does it look like?” This did make us put aside some ideas but I do think it helped us in the usability testing, where we heard the app was easy to use and that it felt intuitive.
Kick-off usability testing. Validating. Not just trying to find bugs but early testing functionality flows and validating design process and ideas. As you go through the process you can see it is not only essential but how it helps you form the right design for your users. I wish more companies truly understood this and employed usability testing, (pre-development). How it makes you, and your ideas take the backseat. Function over Visuals, and finding that sweet spot where they meet.
We ended the project with four design iterations, based off of three usability testing rounds. As I mentioned above, we received positive feedback each round, the app seemed overall easy for users to understand and use but each round also taught us that users wanted some common things:
Experience tasks through to completion
Clarity in copy
Simplicity when trying to complete tasks
Confirmation once tasks were complete
Experience task completion. Not only did they want us to tell them what would happen, but they also wanted to experience it for themselves. Even though this was a testing environment, they wanted that instant gratification of knowing what they did had an impact. We addressed this by adding additional testing screens that walked the user through the entire tasks. Which only helped us as we journeyed through the flows and found sometimes minor inconsistencies and sometimes, not so minor. The iterative process helped us design stronger flows.
Clarity in Copy. Especially as we got to higher fidelity iterations, users wanted real words, words that made sense to them. The names of the buttons we added had to be distinct and leading. They became distracted by words so we had to make sure the copy on the screens was intentional and thoughtful.
Simplicity. Keep it simple stupid! They didn’t need a lot of options, they just need the options to be easy. Period. We removed any distractions, simplified some tasks and made the CTAs more prominent.
Confirmations. Much similar to the first topic, experiencing tasks through to competition. Users needed to know what they did, had an impact. They needed those little confirmations to tell them, they were done. They completed the task and could move forward. We addressed this by making sure that once a task’s final tap, click or swipe was done, we made sure there was a visual indication that there was an effect. We changed the alert numbers, made sure the inserted information was shown on the following screens, changed active to inactive states by changing the colors and when those options were not available, we added the super fun, alert message pop-up.
To wrap things up we revisited the business requirements and showed how we could design the revenue potential into the new features. This was done by building out the Venue Host features. We offered a subscription potential, a fee-based model and a promotional option. Interchangeably implanted into the Venue creation side of the new user, the Venue Host.
Thank you for coming on this journey with me, Quinn, and Ben. Here is look at how we designed them CONNECTING and COMMUNICATING through Meetup.
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