To incentivise meaningful human relationships online and offline by becoming the primary touchpoint for hospitality, providing groundbreaking interactive tools to consumers, professionals, and businesses, which are built on top of the largest and first fully mathematised datasets that layer industry entities and turn them into matrices, making hospitality analysable and generative.
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| Domain: | Event Management and HoReCa |
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| Date: | June 2024 - September 2024 |
| Role: | Product Designer, UX/UI Designer |
| Market: | United Kingdom (UK) |
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Purpose: This is a new tool for organizing events in bars and restaurants. It allows users to invite friends, discover new places, and expand their social circles. The system motivates users and helps promote venues through organized parties.
Hangout is a feature that encourages users to participate in offline meetups and events at bars. It allows for easy organization of gatherings, inviting friends, and discovering new venues. The motivational point system incentivizes users to actively participate and provides opportunities to receive discounts at establishments.
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Types of Tests: Quantitative and qualitative.
UX Tools: • Prototype testing, closed (Quantitative). • Qualitative interviews. • AI testing.
Methodology: Double Diamond.
Segmentation: Yes
Iterative Process: Yes
Scenarios:
Two
• Creating a hangout.
• Joining an existing hangout.
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Design-system: Refactoring and improving component base and approach.
Documentation: Writing documentation and describing components.
Communication with development: Collaborative work and planning improvements for components together with the team, creating processes for implementing components from the UI kit into the dev kit.
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Encourage users to engage in offline interactions by creating an environment where they can easily organize meetups and events at bars. Promote venues through the platform and motivate users to organize events through a point system that can be exchanged for discounts.
Many users remain in the online space and lack sufficient motivation to move communication offline. Bars are also not always recognized or visited by new customers due to limited visibility. We need to find a way to engage users in attending events and support venues in their promotion efforts.
1. Joining an Event:
Key-auditory
The user searches for events in their city and joins those that align with their interests
2. Event Organization
Second-auditory
The user creates an event, selects a bar, invites friends, and opens it up for others to join.
3. View recommendations:
Second-auditory
The user browses a list of bars based on recommendations from other users, ratings, and event locations.
Our research focused on understanding what users truly want and the challenges they face. We began by creating a list of interview questions to gather in-depth feedback. All the questions were open-ended to allow participants to express their thoughts freely. Since it was crucial for us to understand how they organize events, interact with bars, and perceive new connections, we divided our script into several topics: event organization, bar selection, social interactions, and motivation.
We used Google Meet for the interviews—it was convenient and quick for everyone. Each conversation lasted about 30-40 minutes.
To streamline the process, we used tools like a 'note-taker' to capture key points.
After the meetings, we used automated transcription tools (such as Otter.ai and the notes recorded by our note-taker) and then manually reviewed the transcripts to ensure nothing was missed. We gathered all pieces of information, grouped them by topic, and highlighted the key points.
Based on the collected data, we began creating personas—fictional characters representing different types of users. We divided respondents into several groups, including those who frequently organize events and those who only join gatherings. After that, we created a user journey for each persona, allowing us to prioritize their issues and identify the areas that needed attention first.
| Step: | Decides to organize a meeting with friends or gather new acquaintances at a bar. | The user is searching for information about a bar | Is a reservation needed? | Organizes and invites people to a hangout. | Track who else will be joining | If it’s a private hangout | Remind participants about the reservation | Continue the hangout or move to another bar | Sharing photos together | Adding people you didn’t know before as friends | Rating | Loyalty system (from our app) |
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| Action: | Wants to gather a group for a hangout. | Checks information about the venue before visiting. | The user calls the bar or sends a message to their social media page to inquire about the possibility of making a reservation. | Sends invitations to friends through messengers or creates an event on Facebook. | Monitors responses in a group chat or on the event page. Especially important if there's a reservation at the venue. | The user creates a private group in a messenger or restricts access to the event on Facebook. | Write in the group chat, or individually to each person, or separately message those not registered on the platform. | When the bar closes, we often decide to continue the party at someone’s place or another venue. | Participants share photos through group chats or create a shared album. | Adds new acquaintances on Facebook or other social networks after the hangout. | Evaluates the atmosphere, service, and menu. | The user decides to actively use the app to organize events and visit bars. |
| Pain: | Difficult to gather all participants in one place, lack of a single channel for event organization. | Scattered information across different platforms, time wasted searching for reliable reviews. | The response is not always quick, with a risk of human error or missed information. | Invitations are scattered across different platforms, making it hard to track who has confirmed their attendance. | No centralized way to track the number of guests, possible confusion. | Limited options for managing access to the event. | Needs to remind manually, which takes time and effort. | How to quickly notify everyone, some might get lost, and it's hard to know immediately how many people will join the after-party. | Photos are scattered across different platforms, making it hard to gather them all in one place. | Potential loss of contact with new acquaintances, difficulty finding them after the event. | The rating process is complicated or time-consuming. | The user lacks motivation to continue organizing events or leaving reviews due to the absence of a tangible reward for their activity. Not all bars offer discounts or bonuses for regular customers. |
| Tools: | WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Facebook. | Google Maps, Instagram, Facebook, TripAdvisor. | Direct call, messengers, or the bar’s website form. | Messengers, Facebook events. | Messengers, Facebook events. | Messengers, Facebook events. | Messengers, manual reminders. | Messengers, in-person communication. | Google Photos, Facebook albums, group chats. | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. | ||
| Google Reviews, TripAdvisor, social networks. | DrinkStar app | |||||||||||
| Emotion: | 😕 (dissatisfaction due to organizational difficulties). | 🤨 (doubt, dissatisfaction due to scattered information). | 😟 (frustration due to the unpredictability of the response). | 😞 (dissatisfaction due to the difficulty of tracking responses). | 😟 (concern due to potential misunderstandings and confusion). | 😩 (frustration due to lack of control over access). | 😟 (concern due to extra effort and time spent on manual reminders). | 😤 (frustration due to the possibility of confusion and losing participants). | 😟 (dissatisfaction due to scattered photos). | 🤨 (doubt due to potential contact loss). | 😕 (dissatisfaction due to complexity or duration of the process). | 😊 (satisfaction and motivation from rewards). |
| Idea: | Add a feature to create an event directly in the app, where the user can choose the type of hangout (open or closed), time and date, as well as the meeting location. | Add the ability to view reviews, photos, and the menu directly in the app. | Integrate an online table reservation option directly into the app, with the ability to preview available tables in advance. | Enable sending invitations through the app, with notifications to track attendance confirmations. | Add a counter for confirmed guests, displaying the list of invitees and their status (confirmed/not confirmed/maybe). | Add a "private event" option, where access is granted via a link or invitation. | Automated reminders through the app one hour before the event for all confirmed participants. | Create an event with an After Party proposal and send a poll (either in the Notification Center or as a push notification) about the After Party: “We’re gathering for an After Party, if you want to join, click the push notification.” | Create a shared event album, for example, in the Venue section | Suggest adding event participants as friends after the hangout ends. Alternatively, keep a history of hangouts with all attendees, where one can view and add friends. | Add a simplified bar rating system directly in the app, where users can quickly leave a review or rate the venue. Users can also comment on the author, repost the review, critique, or thank them. Additionally, there’s an option to leave a tip for the venue, waiter, or bartender. | Introduce a loyalty program where users earn points for organizing events, leaving reviews, and being active in the app. Accumulated points can be exchanged for discounts at bars. |
Once we created these personas, we were able to move on to developing the first interface prototypes. This provided a foundation for designing solutions tailored to the real needs of our users.
At this stage, we also defined the key metrics for successful testing:
time to complete each task, number of clicks, and task completion success rate. The main questions we asked ourselves were:
The next step was creating low-fidelity mockups in Figma. Here, we focused on rapid prototyping, using only basic elements such as buttons, input fields, etc. The mockups were very simple—just grey blocks and placeholders for text—allowing us to concentrate on the core aspect: how the user navigates through the interface. Our goal was to create:
In Maze, we created endpoints based on our scenarios. We linked the clickable Figma prototype with the user journey scenarios in Maze
