Party Planning for Selfridges

This past Friday marked the end of a two week sprint for development of a proposed microsite on party planning for Selfridges — my second project in my UX Design Immersive course at General Assembly in London. This was a fun project as we focused on developing something new for a well-known brand and on helping users resolve issues in their party planning experience.

Project Brief

The project began with a brief that outlined some of the context for needing a party planning microsite and how and why target customers for Selfridges would want to use the site. As part the brief I was asked to create features and user flows that would allow users to:

• Get inspiration for party themes and advice on party planning
• Find themes and related products, and generate options within a certain budget
• Estimate costs for achieving the theme given the number of guests
• Invite and track guests and send reminders
• Split the cost with friends

My process for developing a solution included analysing competitors; conducting user research; identifying common pain points and needs; developing concept maps; creating user flows; iterating screens; and producing a prototype and client presentation.

Study the Brief

Over the course of the two week sprint, it was imperative that we first study our briefs in detail to deduce the key frustrations we would help people solve, key features to motivate action, and key deliverables we would provide to create a solution. I came back again and again to the brief to help me stay on target.

User Personas

I took particular time to read through the user personas and understand their common pain points and needs as they planned parties. The personas were:

• 24-year old fashion marketer, Willow, who hosts house parties with flatmates in Primrose Hill;
• 34-year old, Wanita, who throws parties for her young kids and cares about the environment; and
• 42-year old, Will, who is married, loves Manchester United and has worked as a real estate agent for decades.

Based on their respective budgets and interests, I decided to focus on Willow as the key user persona as she had the largest budget and shopped at brands that, like Selfridges, were in the luxury category.

User Research

To complement what I learned about the user personas, I interviewed 6 people who shared many of the same interests and painpoints in party planning. All of them loved exploring themes and finding products to deliver a holistic party experience — from tableware to costumes. And they almost universally didn’t like the admin that went along with planning and felt that a more centralized function that allowed them to get inspired, find themes and plan a party could be useful. One noted “I love theme parties and finding the right decor but I also hate shopping and would rather be making fun cocktails at home for my friends.”

Competitive Analysis

I also performed an analysis of competitors to Selfridges and in the party planning category — John Lewis, Non Stop Party Shop (in Kensington), and Amazon. They each bring value to the party planning process — providing a range of products, theme ideas, and good delivery services. But none of them yet offer a comprehensive way to plan your party to complement their shopping experience.

Problem Statement & Concept Mapping

After finishing a series of interviews with potential users and my competitive analysis, I wrote down some key takeaways and began sketching out a user journey for the process of planning a party. It was important at this stage to still stay on paper and Post-It in my thought process and designs, to allow me to iterate ideas and flows easily and quickly. The user journey was linked to a task analysis which was a helpful way to break down the actions and related thoughts, feelings and touch points that a user experiences in their process of party planning. You can see it here, going from left to right below, in columns:

Once I had a sense of the user journey, I began developing some initial user flows to show how a user could solve these four problems:

• Choose a party theme & add guests
• Track invited guests & receive alerts if more party supplies needed
• Divide the cost of party supplies between a group of people
• Checkout

My user flow sketches included the following, for choosing a theme:

Once I had a first round of these sketches, I tested them with people to ensure I was headed in the right direction.

This ultimately lead to the following final user flow:

Design Studio

How to design a way to split the cost of a party was a particularly difficult challenge. Would people want to split the cost of the party prior to paying for products or afterwards? Prior to the party or afterwards? I first developed a user flow with the splitting happening before the purchase of items. I then went through a process of brainstorming and sketching with others in my class who were trying to solve the same challenge to see if we could come up with a common solution to this piece of the overall picture. The ‘studio’ was really helpful and again we stayed on paper to make the process quick and easy. We ultimately determined that splitting the cost prior to the payment for goods, using a party fund that all the co-hosts could contribute to, would be the easiest way to split the cost, helping the main host to avoid chasing flatmates around afterwards for their share of the party.

Screen Iterations

Once I was satisfied with the user flows, I began developing a series of screens to match each stage in the flows. Here’s the initial homepage screen:

I also conducted a “card sorting” activity with users, to see how people naturally sorted products into categories. This lead to the following information architecture for the site:

Wireframes

To bring all the user flows, screens and information architecture together, I used a program called Omnigraffle to create wireframes for the site. This is a powerful software that offers a broad range of built-in stencils — shapes, share buttons, etc. — to create sophisticated blueprints for your website that reflect the latest universally accepted icons and standards. I went through a few iterations of the wireframes, testing them on potential users and making changes to user flows and labels — all the while trying to keep my main user, Willow, in mind — how would she feel about this transition? Would this satisfy her need to split the cost? Does this way of selecting theme ideas feel intuitive and fun?

Here was my final wireframe: In it I focused on bringing together key party planning elements into a widget, on left, similar to a trip planning site, where a user can indicate what they are looking for in a party. They can also get inspired and explore different themes through other parts of the homepage, or site. Then when they’re ready, they can go through the Party Planner.

Prototyping

For my screen iterations, I used Invisionapp to create the prototype. After the bear of work in Omnigraffle of getting the wireframes just right, Invision felt like a breeze!

User Testing

User testing was the most critical part of the whole process — after all, if a user couldn’t understand and feel good about the experience of using the site, then it was pointless. I shared my prototype with one of my users and she gave me valuable feedback on smoothing out certain flows, in particular, combining my the “My Guests” and “My Parties” sections of the Manage My Party area into one, so that the party specs, guests and product quantities could be seen in one place.

Presentation

My final step in the process was to develop a presentation to summarize the work for my classmates and to present it to them as if they were clients for whom I was developing the app. I made notes of things to improve for the next presentation — including analysing non-direct competitors for the website, such as party planning sites like Paperless Post.

Next Steps

As a next step for the party planning site, I intend to continue testing the prototype and to smooth out any transitions between steps in the theme selection and party planning process. I also want to think of ways to bring the user’s voice even more into the process — perhaps allowing them to be a party ambassador for Selfridges and to be featured on the microsite.

I’ve also noted things for myself to continue practicing in the next project —

• Push myself to continue thinking outside the box for how to help a user solve their problem;
• Explore more ways to make an experience delightful; and
• Continue to resist any temptations to feel perfectionist about my work and be open to regular user feedback!

Looking forward to the next challenge.