You might have to first text your friends to discuss when or where to hang out and what food to bring. You would also want to find a time that works for everybody. After you settle on the logistics of the event, you would create an event online and share it with your friends.
The core user problem here is that people use different apps to achieve each of these tasks. This involves unnecessary steps of moving across various platforms and having to manually transfer the data from one to another.
To gather insights on how young adults in New York City are utilizing competitors' services to plan and share social events online, I interviewed four target users (age: 20-34) who had been residing in the city for over two years. Based on the data collected, two user archetypes were identified, and I classified the key findings into categories of pain points, opportunities, and positive experiences.
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With the party organizer archetype, I was able to construct a map of touchpoints that illustrate how users are jumping across different platforms to achieve each step in the event creation journey.
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Based on the findings from my earlier user experience analysis, I discovered that many users would have to jump from one service to another to find out people's availability, decide on the details for an event, and create and share the event online. This painful process of going back-and-forth leads to a disconnected user experience. To resolve this issue, our product integrated all these different types of tasks and connected them, resulting in a continuous UX.
They can plan an event with friends through chatting, and if they want to find an agreement on some details for the event, they can start a poll within the chat. Then, the group members will take the poll, and after the displayed time has expired, the results from this poll can be used to create an event that will be shared to other users.
My design of the feature auto-event creation would offer users an engaging way of creating a social event on a chat through polls. As each data from polls (e.g., location, time, food) will transfer to the creation of an event, this feature removes unnecessary steps of moving across various platforms to achieve different tasks.
Assuming I had additional time and resources to evaluate the effectiveness of this feature, I would consider the time required to create a specific event task and the users' subjective satisfaction as potential success metrics. Though I didn’t prioritize edge case scenarios in this design stage, I would also address those (e.g., how to handle a tie from a poll).
As this was my first design internship at a tech company, there were many learning opportunities as a novice designer. I learned how to take on new projects and self-direct my timeline. Though it was challenging at first to adapt to a fast-paced work environment that requires constant iterations of design, I liked witnessing the visible impact of my work and adding values to this project.