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Planning a family activity is an emotional journey

Holidays are coming around the corner. Planning a family activity can be challenging because often the concerns of Covid safety, budget, dietary preferences, and age differences fall on one person. Our goal is to introduce a resourceful tool that primary family planners can turn to.

PROJECT Conceptual Design

ROLE UX/UI Designer

DURATION 2 Weeks

Project Overview

Our team found the most potential for opportunities during the planning and coordination phase of a family activity. After putting together the pieces of our research, and creating a mock-up of the site, we hoped we’re confident that we’re solving our users’ highest needs while planning a family event.

The following are concept designs for a student project during a User Experience Design Immersive program at General Assembly.

The Problem

People feel overwhelmed when planning family activities. They can become stressed out if they are the primary person planning an event, and sometimes they don’t get to focus on actually having fun with their families during the gathering itself. Our team wanted to find areas of opportunity where we could come in and support people as they navigate through the ups and downs of planning an enjoyable time spent with their families.

Our Solution

PlanFa - a responsive website that supports users to plan and coordinate their family events. Also, here is link to the prototype.

01 Easy Set Up for Events

Users can create an event through the website and also invite friends/family to the event.

Create a budget

for the event.

03 Guest RSVP

Guests are given an event code in the invitation email. This minimizes all the hustle of creating an account in order to RSVP or collaborate. Guests also are able to add their dietary / accessibility preference along with their RSVP.

02 Create To-Do / Grocery List

Users are able to create a to-do list or grocery list on the website. Tasks can be assigned to guests for collaboration in order to ease out the users’ workload.

How did we get there?

Our Game Plan

Our team kicked of the project by setting out the game plan:

RESEARCH

SYNTHESIZE

IDEATE

DELIVER

Understanding the Problem

Hearing from the Users

To begin our process, our team conducted interviews with 5 primary family planners to bring about consistent, necessary data for our design proposal. The user interviews were beneficial to us in our research because they helped us build empathy with our users while producing rich qualitative information.

After conducting interviews, we collected a lot of information from the participants. By organizing this information, we used an Affinity Map to help us collaboratively analyze our findings to spot trends.

Key Interview Insights:

Planners seek out spaces that are inclusive to the entire family

Food plans must be suitable for the entire family

Planners prefer to distribute workload to not be overburdened

People want to focus on their families during these gatherings, not plans

Identifying Our Users

With all these research findings, we went on to develop a fictitious person that helps personify a representation of our target audience.

Elana is the face of a target user for our product. She enjoys bonding time with family. As a single mother of 2 kids, she is extremely busy and needs a simple way for her to plan events with her family, so things don’t get confusing or overwhelming. That way she can enjoy herself and not worry about the stress of planning it all herself.

Goals

Everyone in the family enjoys the time together
Building bonds between family
Sit back and focus on spending time with my family

Needs

Food and location suits everyone
Effective communication style between each other
Needs assistance keeping track and organizing things

Frustrations

When things may not go accordingly
When people are confused on what to do
Doing everything myself

Elana
Age 37 • Single Mother • Los Angeles

"It's rewarding to see my family having a good time, but I want to enjoy myself too and not to worry about the stresses of planning it all myself."

To better understand Elana’s pain points and the challenges she faces,, we created a journey map. In our scenario, Elana is hosting a dinner and game night for her extended family from out of town. We mapped out how Elana would research and coordinate the night, as well as what would happen during the night.

After reviewing Elana’s emotional journey, we found that the Coordination/Planning phase is where many of her pain points and negative emotional experience lies. We knew we’d need to make changes here, as this would bring about the biggest positive change for Elana while planning a family activity.

How might we support people to plan fun activities with their families, ensuring all have an enjoyable time while building a stronger bond and creating lasting memories?

Our Design Process

Mobile First Design

Our team started the design from the mobile end which has more restrictions, then expanded its features to create a desktop version. We used a Design Studio to rapidly generate many design ideas and combine the best ideas in a collaborative manner.

Defining a Solution

Our team took some time to ideate features we believed could be solutions for Elana. We used a MoSCoW Method and Feature Prioritization Matrix to prioritize the features we considered to be most crucial in our minimum viable product (MVP). We considered all the ideas that could address Elana’s needs and narrowed them down to give the biggest benefits in the fastest possible time frame.

Here is the design framework we would be focused on:

Set up a dinner / party plan

Organize a to-do / grocery list

Assign guests to collaborate

Guests can note their dietary & accessibility preferences during RSVP

Ready for ideating!

Next, we implemented our final design in Figma to digitize our wireframe. We also designed a clickable prototype and began testing it with real users within our target audience. We interviewed 10 total people in two rounds of testing – first in Mid-Fidelity to garner the most feedback, then with a High-Fidelity prototype. Through tests, users were able to navigate through the tasks, though there were several user challenges that we unveiled that could improve our design.

Users tested the following features:

01 Set Up An Event

All users were able to navigate through and complete the task successfully without any hesitation or problem.

However, our team noticed that the event location was missing in the event form.

02 Create A Grocery List

Two participants initially questioned themselves choosing between the planning icon and the budget icon. We decided to add descriptive titles for the icons in the desktop version.

After the second round of usability testing, users had the same struggle with the icons. We considered adding titles to the mobile view to aid understanding.

03 Assign A Guest For Collaboration

All users were able to navigate through and complete the task successfully without any issue.

04 As A Guest, RSVP The Event And Add Dietary Preferences

All participants had no problem navigating through the mobile site and completing the task directly. However, users expressed that the event code section in the login page was not convenient because it was below the fold.

Also, some participants struggled with scrolling down to hit “done” or hit outside of the box to collapse the drop-down menu. One of the participants brought up a point of the “+” sign on the RSVP page was too small.

After the adjustment, we ran another round of usability testing with our high-fidelity prototype. Users felt the test was straightforward with no big issues to attend to. We saw an increase in time on task, which we expected due to new colors and styles.

Impact

With implementing all the changes, we ran the third round of usability testing by recording time on task, the directness of success, and the easiness rating. Here's how our design improved people's experience:

22.71

second faster to complete the flows

2.5%

improved in direct completions

improved in easiness rating

Here’s what a few users said:

"Really like the idea. The budget section is really cool. Definitely will use it."

"The design is straightforward. Definitely want to use it. Love the ability to assign people to collaborate."

Desktop Design

Now we brought our design to a desktop version. We learned that the timeline and the upcoming events are helpful features for the user. They were stationed on the side of the interface to aid user access.

We also added a calendar to the right-hand side of the interface to help users plan their events efficiently.

Conclusion

After finalizing the desktop and mobile design, we recommend conducting more research and tests in order to bring our product to market.

We also recommend:

Another round of usability testing on mobile and desktop view of our product to gain greater insight.
For future iterations of the product, adding in more features to be an aid for family planners during their research phase by adding event or location tips.

After Thoughts

This project was a great experience, particularly because I was able to learn many core UX skills and apply them directly to solving this design challenge in such a short period of time. I found this project to be a springboard for learning the basics of UX design. My biggest takeaway is to put more time and emphasis on user research as it’s vital to the integrity of a useful website. Also, I should dig deeper on what kind of responsiveness is appropriate for the goals of the business, as well as the users.