How Bringing Trust for New Yorkers Increases Event Attendance
44% of People Have Trouble Gaining Motivation
Without trustworthy information that can be found efficiently, users have trouble gaining motivation and finding/marking things to do along with their interests in New York City.
An App to Increase Events Attendance
In this case study, we explore how a mobile app that offers flexible search methods and comprehensive information can build trust for New Yorkers. In addition, the social function of the app encourages users’ attendance at events, thus benefiting the hosts’ business.
Sige Zheng
UX/UI Designer
Responsibilities: User Research, Branding, Sketching, Wireframing, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing
Duration: 2 Months
Design Tools: Miro, Sketch, Figma, InVision Studio, InVision, Marvel, Google Suite
Approach: Human-centric Design
Platform: Mobile App
44% of People Have Trouble Gaining Motivation
Without trustworthy information that can be found efficiently, users have trouble gaining motivation and finding/marking things to do along with their interests in New York City.
An App to Increase Event Attendance
In this case study, we explore how a mobile app that offers flexible search methods and comprehensive information can build trust for New Yorkers. In addition, the social function of the app encourages users’ attendance at events, thus benefiting the hosts’ business.
Sige Zheng
UX/UI Designer
Responsibilities: User Research, Branding, Sketching, Wireframing, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing
Design Tools: Miro, Sketch, Figma, InVision Studio, InVision, Marvel, Google Suite
Duration: 2 Months
Approach: Human-centric Design
Sige Zheng
UX/UI Designer
Responsibilities: User Research, Branding, Sketching, Wireframing, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing
Design Tools: Miro, Sketch, Figma, InVision Studio, InVision, Marvel, Google Suite
Duration: 2 Months
Approach: Human-centric Design
66% Employment Drop in New York City
During COVID, the arts and entertainment industry in New York City suffered the most from unemployment. 87,000 employment dropped to 34,100 after 2020. Many event and art venues closed down in 2020, and only started to partially open with limited capacity in 2021 as more people start to receive the vaccine. However, not all New Yorkers find it easy to get back to their social life.
(Meredith Deliso, 2021, source)
50% of Americans express re-entry anxiety.
As COVID restrictions are slowly being lifted, some people see it as a sign of returning to “normalcy”, while others experience the mixed feeling of excitement, uncertainty, stress, and anxiety. According to research, nearly 50% of Americans admit feeling anxious about resuming social interactions, and those who were vaccinated expressed the same level of concerns as those who have not.
(Michael Hinck, 2021, source)
On top of anxiety, the lack of comprehensive information breeds distrust.
We recruited 5 New Yorkers who were experiencing re-entry anxiety to explore more about their difficulties attending events.
Interviews showed that New Yorkers don’t receive all the information they need at their first event information access point. Acquiring information about the organizers, artists, event space, transportation, and price takes a long time and they give up early in the process. Without knowing enough about the event or hosts, people don’t trust the quality of the events thus don’t feel like it’s worth their time attending.
Because of the lack of comprehensive information, some New Yorkers have also lost interest in exploring more events. People lose track of hosts they were familiar with as well because most hosts keep people up to date using newsletters that are rarely read.
By creating an affinity map, we learned that even with the diversity of events and the varieties of access to events information, the lack of comprehensive information breeds distrust, and the excessive amount of time needed to gain such information drains motivation.
Affinity Map Analyzing Interviews
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Lea Pearson and Her Re-Entry Anxiety
Lea is a freelance content creator living in NYC. She moved to NYC right before COVID for work, but hasn’t been able to explore the city much due to the pandemic. Lea wants to find new activities and happenings in the city to develop her personal interest and to find inspirations for her work.
Even fully vaccinated, Lea is experiencing re-entry anxiety. Having spent a lot of time alone in the past year, Lea gets anxious going into a new environment where she doesn’t know anyone or feel like she’d be able to talk to anyone. Thus, she hesitates whenever she thinks about attending events. When searching for events to go to, she finds it hard to learn enough information about them to convince herself it’s worth going.
How Might We Help Lea Explore Events with Trust?
Personalized Exploration
According to research, 80% of people are more likely to get involved with a product that offers a personalized experience. When users are valued as individuals and can feel the experience is built around them, they trust the product or brand more.
Social Proof
92% of users check out reviews online before deciding to acquire a product. Moreover, people think reviews are 12 times more trustworthy than descriptions written by the correlated business.
Shared Experience
Around 58% of people see socialization as one of the biggest motivations for attending events. They also see an event as trustworthy when there are human connections built from it.
Difficulty in Following Increases Distrust
Incomplete User Journey
Facebook Events, ArtRabbit, and VART, the three event-finding platforms, share very similar user journeys. Users are shown multiple events with no personal correlations; they are only given limited filters to narrow down the selections; they are presented with limited event information with few hyperlinks that give them direct access to planning. The user journey stops after users consume information about an event they may be interested in.
These three platforms function more as one-way information delivery channels. The shallow user journey doesn’t build trust for users or bring them to an end action of attending events.
User Journey of Finding an Event on Facebook Event
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Inconsistent Design
ArtRabbit and VART interfaces are hard to follow due to the lack of stylistic consistency and organization. With little hierarchy of user potential actions and information, inconsistent image and event card sizing, and the overwhelming variety of font styles, users get distracted and lost on the platform. Making it difficult for users to follow the flow across pages, these platforms don’t make users feel fun and trustworthy in the search process, thus they hardly lead users to attend events.
ArtRabbit Home Page, Browsing Page, and Event Page
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To boost Lea’s trust and motivation, we want to build a platform with personalized exploration, social proof, shared experience, complete user journey, and consistent design. Can a mobile app be the solution?
Unclear Action Results in Abandonment
5 potential users who share Lea's problem tested the wireframe prototype.
Users did not click on the action items (location, buy ticket, event website) in the event information section because they didn’t understand the items as clickable. They were hesitant to explore the Event Buddy page due to their lack of understanding of the Event Buddy icon.
Lack of Action Items
Without differentiating “buy ticket”, “location”, and “event website” from “event time” and “venue type” in the basic event information section using UI design, users can’t tell these items can lead to further actions to help her plan her trip.
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Unclear Event Buddy Icon
When the Event Buddy icon looks too similar to the user profile icon, users find it hard to understand what it means. Hence, they hesitate to click on the icon and move furthermore.
(click to enlarge)
To further Lea’s event exploration experience, we wanted to lead her to take actions on planning. Thus, we explored how to make action items more clickable.
Can Hyperlinks Reduce Lea’s Action Items Learning Curve?
Just looking clickable isn’t enough for Lea to take actions.
After making iterations, we tested the high fidelity design with 5 more users (see prototype). We learned that there’s a significant loss of connection between the event buddy function and the event page. The task priority analysis shows most critical issues to resolve are:
- Lack of inter-page connection
- Too much to read
- Hard to navigate the search methods
- Hard to understand the new functions
Hyperlinks Fail in User Actions
Although Hyperlinks adapts users' knowledge as “clickable”, users didn't find the drive to click on them to see their “source”.
Visual Heaviness
When we try to present users with comprehensive information of events, it’s easy to give them too much to see at a time. Hyperlinks increase text heaviness and users lose interest quickly.
(click to enlarge)
Scattered Action Icons are Distracting
Users find it hard to see the search by keyword / location / filters methods on the home page.
Without the use of colors in the wireframe, users could notice the icons and understand what they do. However, they failed to locate the actionable icons in the HiFi design due to the scattered placements of the icons and the increase of color and images used.
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Unusable New Function Starts with Icon
We tested different icons to illustrate the Event Buddy function. However, due to unfamiliarity, users still found it hard to make sense of the function.
Users also didn't find the “Hashtag” section helpful. Instead of learning about what it feels like to be at the event, she sees the section as another shallow description of the event and doubts its credibility.
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After studying problems we found from this round of testing, we aim to make iterations to better connection pages across the app, create a low-burden app browsing experience, and present new functions more clearly for a smoother events exploration process.
Buttons Increase Product Usability
Event Page Action Items as Buttons
Using buttons brings attention to action items for the users. Primary button emphasizes the “Event Buddy“ function. Buttons take users directly to browser or map, making planning more efficient.
Reducing Visual Burden with Negative Space
Using the “card” idea divides the event information into individual sections and adds negative space and reduces visual burden. Users need less time to review information and are more engaged with the new designed page.
(click to see video)
Inducing Actions on Event Buddy Page
Adding action buttons on the Event Buddy page shows the potential actions more clearly.
The plus button allows users to create new prompts directly on the Event Buddy page without going back to the home page to find an event again, thus better connecting the Event Buddy page with the events.
(click to see video)
Reorganizing for Visual Priorities
Grouping the “search” / “filter” / “location” search methods together helps users locate them easily.
Emphasize visual and function hierarchy with two different sizes of “event card” - prioritize “highlights of the week” section which shows sponsored events matching users’ interests.
Increased accessibility by avoiding text over image on the small event cards.
(click to see video)
Labeling and Using Accent Color
Using accent color clarifies the page users are on. Labeling functions helps users navigate through the app with better directions.
(click to see video)
Hashtag to Browsing by Themes
Inspired by Spotify’s idea of browsing for new music by special groups and Airbnb’s idea of searching for housing by fun categories, the “browse by themes” section now replaces Hashtag, which was originally used to inform users the “vibe” of an event. Now users can checkout events of special vibe/themes.
(click to see video)
EvenMore - Event Hopping with a Partner
Lea is on her way to joining events of her favor with friends!
With the iterations made on the high fidelity design, we tested the prototype with 5 more users (see prototype).
- Lea recognizes the more specific search methods of searching by keywords / location / filters.
- Lea finds the browsing by themes page exciting and expressed she’s been in the mood for certain themes but weren’t able to find suitable events before.
- On the event page, Lea clicks on the “Event Buddy” button and understands she can match with someone to potentially go to the event with. She checks out the map location for some events. She reads the reviews.
- Lea creates an Event Buddy prompt for events she’s interested in.
- Lea checks out the Event Buddy page and finds it easy to add a new prompt there.
- Lea finds it easy to navigate through her prompts and event buddy matches, however, she doesn’t know if she can choose whom to confirm the match with.
Conclusion
To help people like Lea who are experiencing re-entry anxiety and to boost the art and entertainment industry, we created an event-search mobile app with a meet-up function. Through the design process, we found that:
- Looking clickable doesn’t mean usable.
- Clear buttons encourages conversion.
- Minimal UI Increases user engagement.
- Comprehensive information breeds trust.
- A complete end-to-end experience induces retention and action.
The final product, EvenMore, provides comprehensive information and social proof which allow Lea to trust both the event and event host more. The Event Buddy function helps her find a friend to participate in events with. Together with using CTA buttons to involve Lea early in the planning process, the app motivates her to attend events of their likings.
What’s More and What’s Next?
Besides building trust and motivation for Lea, we also explored the users’ onboarding experience of EvenMore. We delivered a shorter onboarding journey than the originally designed one while capturing users’ personal preferences for better-personalized suggestions.
For the next step, we want to look into the details of the Event Buddy function. On top of the basic matching and chatting functions, we want to give users control for match confirmation. So users would spend the least time finding someone most suitable for attending an event with.
The current project scope focuses on the participants’ experience. In the next step, we want to expand it with a hosts' portal, so the app can self-feed itself with archiving and updating events. We'd also like to explore the possibility of making the app adaptable for cities across the US and maybe even worldwide with a user location function.
