- Prototyping
- Design strategy
- Content strategy
- Visual design
Scope of work
- Full-scale web app
- Full-scale mobile app
- User research
- Interaction design
An App for Event & Activities
Over 20,000 events and activities were hosted across San Francisco last year and chances are you didn't attend any of them. In fact you didn't know what those events were or where they took place.
Socialplex created an app that helps you discover events and activities in your area. Watch events come to life online so that you can make better choices before taking the plunge. By improving the event experience Socialplex helps users forge meaning memories.
The Problem
- Users have a hard time finding events that they can trust and that they find valuable.
- It is just as hard to find useful information about events that will help users make a informed decision.
Creating Meaningful experiences
Good events are often forgotten but great events live on forever. That's the mantra the Socialplex team would go on to live by as we created our app.
I hypothesized that great events were always a function of meaningful experiences. Our challenge was to figure how to define and help facilitate a meaningful experience.
Process & Design Thinking
The assumption was simple. A large segment of the population never makes it out to events because the cost outweigh the benefit.
Too much time is spent searching for the right events without satisfactory results. This led us to believe that this helped fuel the "safe bet" result. More people make plans around activities that involved food and beverage, like going to restaurants, clubs, and bars because it was a safe bet. For instance, a birthday dinner at Cheescake Factory had less likelihood of failure with smaller upside than a successful event.
WE HAVE TO DE-RISK EVENTS THE WAY YELP DE-RISKED FOOD AND BEVERAGE
Finding events and activities comes with a lot of friction. Part of the problem is that there isn't a central repository of organized content. Since that content doesn't exist in such a way it ultimately doesn't establish history and value.
Creating value is a bit tricky
While the system of ratings and reviews are ubiquitous and work well for establishments, products and services that have a long shelf life it doesn't help build value for events in the same way. Instead value will be introduced through the organization's brand with events stacked as assets. Content by way of events and social media data will be used to build history and value.
Increasing an Event's Shelf Life
When we set out to make events last forever we found it was the events and activities that got the most social media chatter were exposed to users for longer periods. With this increased visibility user got a better feel for events and organizers beyond the scope of the actual event itself.
Calling on All Enthusiasts & Tastemakers
Distribution and promotion play a vital role in how long an event remains relevant. Although our findings show that when event goers are spreading the word it makes all the difference.
Event enthusiasts
These outspoken event goers never pass up on an opportunity to brag about the next big thing or educate their network about things like which shoes are best for the next weekend's run.
Tastemakers
This class of event goer will play a slightly different role. Typically they are somewhat of a local celebrity with a following. They often will curate content which others can enjoy.
High value clean data needs context to be relevant
Having the right data makes all the difference. Part of our challenge was to put together a useful event catalogue with accessible content. So we pulled down content from a variety of sources, purged the bad apples and collated the rest.
What we were left with was an event page that was full of rich content that had context.
Making History on Day 1
Part of making events live on forever is to make sure its content keeps cycling throughout the web until the next event begins. So it is important for old events and their data to be accessible. Event detail pages are archived and become historical data for users to search, enjoy, and help them make future decisions. We also found that showing history will:
- Improve virality of an event
- De-risk the event by enhancing brand recognition and trust
- Allow organizations to gain access to user generated content and help keep track of brand representation
- Reduce promotional costs and improve customer retention.
User Workflow
Users will begin their experience at a feed where they will see content from organizations they've subscribed to
The Visual Implementation
Vibrant & Balanced Branding
Socialplex's mark was designed to represent a variety of content coming together in one space
Event Details
Come for basic information, stay for the rich social media content
Dynamic Content Cards
Delivering aggregated content with harmony
Impactful Event Trailers
Video increases positive consumer decisions by over 80%
External Pages
Content is viewable and sharable across the app
Final Thoughts
We met our fair share of naysayers when we took on the challenge to craft a solution in a crowded event space. My response was to these people always, "you must be really satisfied with the way you discover events and activities then!"
Design isn't about how busy or wide open a space is, it's about creating solutions to real problems. The challenge that we faced on this project is that the solution went beyond simply creating an app. I had to reimagine an interaction that currently didn't exist.
SyncinG data and User's needs
"Creating a spark" or Matching a user's desire to find content they want when they want it. Data related to future events are are difficult to come by or often do not exist. Reviving historical event data, repurposing, and correlating it to current events was a big challenge our team faced. As the historical archive grew this task became easier.
This led to questions and solutions around how to acquire real-time data by way of sentiment analysis across social networks. This will likely be part of the next steps.
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