Event Planner

Enhance the event organizing process for remote teams to facilitate team gatherings.

Mobile design

Concept

Designathon 1st winner

Responsibilities

Product design, visual design

Team

2x Designers

Timeline

31 hours, 2022

Meet at Once is a design project destined to solve the challenge presented by Relevant Bit during the McMaster Design League UI/UX Designathon.

This app is designed as a centralized event platform to help remote professional teams easily organize events and foster meaningful connections. Over two days, I collaborated closely with two teammates to take this concept from scratch to a high-fidelity prototype. Our solution won the first prize out of over 300 participants and was highly praised by the judges for its design quality and strategic approach.

Results

Won the first prize out of over 300 participants and was highly praised by the judges for its design quality and strategic approach.

Challenge

Remote teams need an easier way to plan team-gathering events for building relationship

During the pandemic, many organizations are transitioning to remote work settings, but face-to-face events remain important for building strong team relationships. However, planning these events can take too much times and challenging, in needs of a solution to help them plan events in an easier way.

Problem

Event planning is complicated for its unstructured nature and high effort needed

Our user research found that event planning and management are often time-consuming and require significant effort due to the challenges of communication, coordination, and tracking numerous details. This process is often unguided, making it more difficult and stressful.

Solution

oNBOARDING

Collecting attendee information for events more naturally and effectively

Individual preferences are collected during onboarding. When creating events, the organizers can access this information from their attendees, avoiding repeated requests or providing the same details.

HOSTING

A guided planning process for simple and stress-free experience

Users are guided through each planning step, allowing them to create events without providing all details at once. Besides that, they can manage events, track RSVPs, and view event resources, all within the event center.

Step-by-step guide to creating a event with basic info

Add further details, review RSVP or resources in the event center

ROLE

Easily switch between roles as the event organizer and the attendee

Our research found that users can become either organizer or attendee roles for different events. As such, our app enable users to view all events at once. We use unique visual elements to distinguish clearly between different roles.

SOCIAL

Share memory and connect with others to foster team relationship

Building relationships is what matters for the team gatherings, so the post-event photos and chat room bring memories and a shared space for attendees to stay connected and build relationships even after the event has ended.

User Research

Understand how teams plan events and who is involved

Since we're building a tool for professional team, knowing the workflow of how they plan an event and the stakeholder involvement are important. We researched on 20+ forum posts and interviewed 5 employees who had planning or attending events before.

Key Findings

Initial requirement is usually decided early by manager & HR.
The organizer role is typically assigned to a team member to handle the event planning.
Small-to-medium team gatherings are more common during the pandemic.

JOURNEY AND STAKEHOLDER MAPPING

The Persona

Define the persona by roles instead of job title: the organizer and the attendee

When planning events, the organizer role are not strictly defined by one's job title or professional responsibilities. This means a team member can be assigned to plan the event A, and become the attendee in event B. As such, instead of labeling our users by job title, we defined the persona by roles, and narrowed down to the following two types: the organizer (primary), and the attendee (secondary).

Users' Pain Points

Organizers, wanting to plan a event that satisfies everyone, struggle with the complexity and challenges of event planning

One common pattern emerged from our research when uncovering the pain points — event planning is often complicated and overwhelming.

Lack of guidance

Organizers have to take time creating their own plans to keep track of everything.

Complexity of event planning

Organizers must juggle factors like budget, time, location, transportation, policies, communication, and attendee needs, making the process overwhelming and difficult to manage.

Use multiple tools

Need to switch between multiple tools when planing, which can be time-consuming and frustrating.

Coordinate information is difficult

Coordinating with others can be a hassle for organizers, especially when gathering personal preferences and needs.

How might we...

make event planning simple and intuitive?
make it easier to collect attendee's preference & needs?
help the team to build better relationship?

Ideation

Quickly ideate and define user paths through brainstorming and user flow mapping

We kicked off a brainstorming session to generate and refine our ideas, mapping the user flows to visualize the user paths. This approach ensured we could progress quickly and facilitate team discussions while focus only on the interaction-level design.

We brainstormed various ideas and then voted on those we believed would be most helpful and necessary for users.

Mapping the user flows helped us define the user paths and functionality, and visualized how different user roles will interact with each other.

Blueprints

Wireframing the blueprints that guides the final design

Developing the wireframe first helped us establish the layout and structure and reach a team consensus. Ultimately, it made us move much faster in high-fidelity design and saved us time from making excessive changes, which was crucial given the tight timeline.

I created the wireframe following the user flows to structure the app's layout, helping our team visualize the screens and flows we'd need to create.

Visual Design

A cohesive design language to create professional and energetic visual identity

We envisioned the app to be energetic, approachable, and professional. A set of visual elements—logo, style guide, and components—was built to bring a cohesive design language to our app and ensure a consistent experience.

Color

Use professional blue, vibrant yellow, and neutral tones to convey a corporate feel, energy, and cleanliness.

Radius

Apply round corner to create a sense of approachability and friendliness.

Final Design

Meet at Once: bridge the gap from online to offline

After multiple rounds of reviewing within the team, refining the design, and prototyping, we were finally ready to present our high-fidelity prototypes to the judges. In the end, our team won first prize for this design challenge! 🎉
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Given the time constraints, we focused on three features — onboarding, event creation, and attendee networking. We hope to continue exploring and iterating the app if we have more time, such as adding calendar sync and voting polls for attendees, or designing a desktop version of the app to better manage large-scale events.

Closing Thoughts...

Short-on-time as the key constraints

Since this was a designathon project, we were given a design challenge without a clear scope or user group, and had just two days to develop a high-fidelity solution. This meant we had to be thoughtful with each step of our design process and use our time efficiently to deliver a solution rooted in real user needs.

8 hours

Research

through desk research and user interviews to define user journey and pain points.

6 hours

Exploration

through brainstorming, user flows mapping, and refine ideas to guide design focus.

15 hours

Design

through wireframing, building design library, low-fi to hi-fi mockups and prototypes.

Virtual collaboration and communication

Even though our team were all in different timezones, we embraced the remote setup and stayed active in discussions, always responding to each other’s messages. The virtual setting didn’t make things harder—it actually helped us understand our target users better. We used tools like Discord and FigJam to share ideas, communicate, and collaborate.