Free City

How can GTA residents easily access affordable cultural activities?

This is an in-class group project conducted within three months. My primary contributions include:

  • Led the prototyping and evaluation sprints

  • Individually conducted research data analysis

  • Co-created task flow and low-fi storyboards

Sector

Cultural and entertainment

Team

Xinyan Fu, Mengtong Li, Dan Xu, Nadia Smith

Design Tools

Figma, Photoshop, Procreate, Datawrapper

Timeline

September 2023 to December 2023

Problems

Ontarians value cultural experiences. However, challenges such as the rising cost of living are preventing many from participating in a full range of cultural activities. Research indicates a need for more affordable and accessible cultural experiences.

User Research

To identify specific user pain points, my team designed a survey with 43 responses and conducted 10 interviews to learn about people's experiences participating in cultural activities in Toronto.

WHAT DID WE LEARN?

Torontonians are facing a challenge in experiencing the city's cultural activities to the fullest due to the absence of a centralized hub for affordable cultural events. Currently, people rely on social media or word of mouth to find events, which can be overwhelming. And most of them don’t know about the discounts or free events in the city.

Affordability

Dependency on Social Media

Importance of Engagement

Information Overload

Torontonians wanted an information hub that would help them locate free or discounted events and socialize with those who share a similar interest.

Building Empathy

Developing a persona and mapping out their user journey provides a clear look at our users’ emotions. It will guide the remaining design process, ensuring that user concerns are not only identified but actively resolved to create a more user-centric and effective event aggregation process.

Design Ideation

In our brainstorming session, we generated 14 ideas that fell under 6 themes.

With that, we conducted a feasibility and impact assessment and determined 3 key initiatives to focus on for our initial prototype and accomplish these goals:

  1. Users can access details of cultural events all in one place;

  2. Users can discover cultural events that are specific to their interests;

  3. Users can find free or discounted events so they can attend them more often.

User Flow

Before turning our ideas into prototypes, I visualized the user’s journey and developed a task flow. Informed by research data and user needs, the task flow depicts primary key task streams that our prototypes would focus on personalized information feed and find and save events.

With that, I created a low-fidelity storyboard along with another team member. It can be simplified to the following 2 tasks:

Lean Evaluation

We took this sketch to 3 potential users and asked for their feedback, and we found that users want more event categories and the ability to select multiple answers. They also couldn’t edit their preferences after onboarding and had different opinions on locating sharing. Additionally, we found that the prototype could benefit from a menu to help users transition between pages. 

PROPOSED SOLUTION

  1. Introduce a consistent global navigation system

  2. Enhance the comprehensiveness of onboarding by including diverse event categories and engaging UX writing

  3. Create a page for users to edit their personalized feed

  4. Revamp the location selection to provide more options

Clickable Prototype

With that, my teammate and I designed the latest clickable prototype which allows users to complete three tasks:

1. Onboarding

Users choose their preferred cultural event types, specify their locations, and indicate their ideal price range.

2. Bookmark events

The For You Page generates a list of personalized recommendations for users, while the Explore Page presents all cultural events available in the city. Users can choose to see event details and bookmark them. All bookmarks are saved under the Favorites Page.

3. Edit preference

Users can change their preferences on the Profile Page, which can be found through the navigation bar.

(Clickable prototype to the right, and also available on Figma)

Usability Testing

I took this prototype to another three representative users again for feedback, where I observed their interaction and conduct interviews afterwards. Here are some outtakes.

Task Completion

Overall Satisfaction

Test participants had issues with icons, personalization, and navigation. One person asked what the For You Page would look like if they skipped onboarding, which came as a surprise. Meanwhile, onboarding questions were exciting for users because it’s what they “care about the most.” On top of that, a user thought the overall design was sleek but could use some fun elements to attract users.

Here’s how I plan to fix the problems in the next iteration:

  1. Create different styles for the For You Page and the Explore Page

  2. Improve UX writing to further engage users

  3. Clarify some icons and language used for features (replace “Favorite” with “Bookmarks” to avoid confusion)

  4. Continue developing the event rating and online community features

Lessons Learned

  1. As my first UX project, I learned the fundamental principles and gained familiarity with the design process. Specifically, I developed skills in organizing and strategizing tasks for prototyping and usability testing as a team lead.

  2. Always focus on the user’s needs. Throughout our process, I constantly revisited user pain points and need statements to ensure that our design efforts remained aligned with the actual needs of our users. This step proved not only helpful but also essential in guiding our project to success.

  3. Users would rather have more options than less. The desire for “more” became a recurring theme throughout user testing. This experience taught me that, in user-centric design, the emphasis should be on providing users with more possibilities and allowing them to decide how they want to engage with the platform.