rSource
An app that connects hosts to the resources they need in order to organize a successful event.
The Challenge
Our team was initially brought in to explore the possibility of an independent event planning platform targeting hosts and organizers of an educational marketplace because our client saw an opportunity in the in-person education space.
We researched the need to provide white-glove support on an event planning platform for people in the education marketplace who wanted to teach their knowledge in-person.
Research
Based on our findings, we redefined the educational marketplace to mean a learning experience in order to include nontraditional class environments.
Instead of providing a platform for hosts to share their knowledge, we should focus on connecting them to the resources they require to do so.
Persona A
We created personas after redefining the scope to better understand our user base.
We created research artifacts to help us understand our users' workflow.
We then started brainstorming solutions.
Journey Map
Persona B
Empathy Map
Brainstorming
We developed four distinct concepts to determine which would best address our reimagined scope.
We tested our concepts with 9 different users with varying interests to ensure that our concept was valid without bias toward a specific activity.
We discovered that two of our four concepts best address our end user's goals after testing them with multiple users.
We realized that we focused too much on the social media aspect after merging the two concepts and testing with more users.
A user quoted:"It feels like social media and marketing focused more than resource sharing. It feels like a slightly altered version of Instagram with a hint of Airbnb."
Concept A
Concept C
Concept B
Concept D
Initial Wireframe
We iterated our design to avoid becoming an extension of another app by making the search function our MVP.
Solution
We are able to provide quick and easy access to the right information and resources to our users by making the search feature our primary tool for navigating hosts to directly what they need and providing an explore page for those who simply wanted to browse.
As a result, we arrived at our final design — rSource.
Final Thoughts
More expansive research can be conducted to make sure our final design is using accurate terminology to represent the functions we have on our application. Further tests should be conducted with past and future participants outside of our network to determine if we properly narrowed down our features and accounted for their feedback.
A personal takeaway I learned from this project is to remember what your MVP is and don’t stray from it by focusing too much on additional features to enhance the MVP. That was a problem we had throughout this project and it forced us to redesign the whole project two days before the deadline.