GatherUp
Project Overview
GatherUp is an app to help busy professionals save time with social planning.
My Role
This is a personal project for Designlab that took 2 months to create. It took extra 1 month to redesign the project after gaining more experience from other personal projects. I worked on User research, Design, Wireframes, Prototypes, and User Tests.
The Problem
The Solution
Event planning is time consuming and difficult to keep track of time, date, activities, and people. After doing competitive research, users liked the ability to plan in one app.
Having a product that uses machine learning to quickly plan events will help provide a better event planning experience.
Discover 01/05
What are the current trends for existing products? What could I do better?
First step was to look for existing event planning platforms to see what I can do better. The biggest competitors have integrated chats, RSVP options, and polls and questionnaires and only some have shared calendar feature and activity/location suggestions. From the competitive research, I learned that many event planning apps do good in many ways such as having interactive features and and creating engagement but lack in customization and giving suggestions.
What are the User’s painpoints?
My next step was conducting interviews with people who plans events regularly. Commutation was a key point in people’s positive experience in event planning.
Who is my target audience?
From the interviews, I developed simplified versions of personas that represent the target audience in order understand the goal of the project.
Define 02/05
I organized my user’s answers about struggles of event planning which was mainly about getting activity suggestions. This will help me focus on the problem I am trying to solve while designing the app.
Ideate 03/05
What steps should users take to plan an event?
My next step was to create a task flow to think about how users can plan events without confusion and as quick as possible. There is a before and after because after redesigning the app, the initial task flow changed while minimizing the screens needed.
Design 04/05
Logo
The logo is a robot since the concept of the app is to use machine learning to plan events.
Color
After testing out multiple color choices, I decided to look at some adult social events (target audience is busy professionals) to get color inspiration and the color choices were inspired from the gradient lights at a nightclub from dark purple to light purple with mixes of pink. Purple also stimulates creativity which is needed when planning events and trust especially since the chatbot will do majority of the planning work for the user. The user would have to trust the chatbot to successfully complete its task. The main background color is a gradient background with various purples and shades of blue mixed together to mimic that nightclub lights.
Font
The font Circular Std was chosen for its clean and modern style.
Wireframe to Final design process
The image above shows the welcome screen. The before was the initial design and had the log in option right away, but I changed the welcome screen to a more simple and welcoming design by not making the users overwhelmed by seeing the log in page right away. The goal was to make the app feel friendly and felt like the initial design did not achieve that feeling, so I added round/bubbly images to create a soft friendly welcoming page.
The images above shows process of simplifying the signup steps by minimizing the number of screens needed to signup. I felt like the signup information could be condensed into one page since the first design choice had a lot of white space and felt too “robotic".” I wanted to change the vibe to a friendly tone by giving the option for users to choose a cute default profile image instead of having a static robot image if they chose to not have a profile picture.
Next, I redesigned the home page, chat page, and event page. Nothing drastic changed other than simplifying the navigation bar and changing the background. I also added a mini tutorial page to let users know Botley is available by clicking on the icon.
Final Design 05/05
Final Design and Reflection
Overall, I feel satisfied with the redesign because it feels more modern, friendly, and colorful. I also got to practice autolayout on Figma which I was struggling with in the beginning. I had fun playing around with the color palette and how far I had advanced compared to the beginning. My next step would be to create more screens for the prototype and conduct user testing!
