Uxcel 2023 Design Contest

Theme: Brazilian Holiday Season

5 min readDec 22, 2023

Introduction

The holiday season is a time of joy, celebration, and adventure for many people around the world. However, coming up with end of the year ideas for activities to do, places to go and events to participate in can be a challenging task — especially in a place as diverse and unique as Brazil: there’s a myriad of traditions, local happenings and peculiarities of the holidays exclusive to the biggest country of Latin America.

With that in mind, various questions come to mind: “How can the Brazilian holiday season experience be simpler but still enjoyable? How can it be more intuitive and personalized? How can it be tailored to the user’s location, preferences and needs?”

Why? (The Problem)

TL;DR: Brazil’s holiday season is nothing like the highly televised US’. As a Brazilian, I want to honor the end of the year season diversity, putting Brazil under the spotlight.

As a Brazilian, watching American holiday season movies was absolutely unrelatable: Snow? Sledding? Carols? Gingerbread houses? Those were almost fictive to me: a winter wonderland fairy tale. I have only ever known and experienced the tropical Brazilian Holidays™: summer, rabanada, farofa, passion fruit mousse, the beach, jumping over seven waves, palm trees with string light and white clothing.

This culturally rich experience that mixes Brazil’s Native, African and European roots has shaped my view of the end of year. But it does not, in the slightest, translate the complete Brazilian holiday experience: there’s so many other traditions and adventures spread out through this continental country.

Solution

A colorful design for “BOAS FESTAS,” a Brazilian holiday app, with a cream-colored background, heading and description of the app, call to action button, abstract decorations, fun stickers and three stylized characters using their devices.

As a result of this brainstorming, a solution comes to mind: an user-friendly and engaging website that helps Brazilians discover, compare, and reserve the best holiday events for themselves and their loved ones.

Boas Festas — “Happy Holidays” in brazilian portuguese — will focus on experiences that resonate with the diversity of options, constraints and likings of users and that honor Brazil’s origins.

Who can use it?

Brazilians all across the land of samba, soccer and farofa can use this website to find events tailored to their preferences, needs and location within the vast and diverse territory of Brazil. The app meets the particularities of many folks, including — but not limited to — :

A hard-working father who wants to schedule the perfect end of the year experience for his family, including his two kids and dog, but is too busy with work to keep up with the best places and activities;
A groovy young adult who wants to party hard with their friend group and make the most out of the holiday season, and needs fresh and hand-picked places to go;
An old couple that wants to take it easy and relax: stay away from the busyness of everyday life. Their disco days are in the past now, and they want calm & romantic dates to spend this time of the year together.

Check the Figma file (at the ‘The Project’ section) to learn more about their goals, motivations, pain points and behaviors!

Competitive research

Upon further research, specific apps for holiday season events weren’t found. Especially ones targeted towards Brazil and its rich culture. General event apps such as AllEvents and Eventbrite were acknowledged, but they were too broad in scope to use as a baseline for such a specific contest. The two platforms found that most resembled what I had in mind were Holiday Happenings and Partytrick.

Holiday Happenings focuses on school break activities for kids, but its clean and objective user interface inspired me. Most of the features I had previously defined — categories, filters, favorites, etc. — were present in the app and made me critically analyze thoroughly how they were implemented.

Partytrick is an event hosting app that gives users curated event ideas with checklists, reminders, DIYs, shopping lists and much more! This app came to my attention via the Designer Daily Report daily collection, and I’m glad it did! It’s elegant, practical and has a great approach. Features like shared itineraries were something I already had in mind, but it was definitely nice to see how they implemented it.

In conclusion, in spite of little to no application or website specific to my theme or problem being found, many features could use improvement. Overall design was a key factor, including more intuitive usability and bold, colorful visuals.

Features

An illustration of a person with green hair and a red Christmas hat standing in the center of five colored circles with icons and texts related to features of the “Boas Festas” app.

Boas Festas includes various features to make the event finding and booking experience seamless, intuitive and practical. It includes:

A search system that allows users to filter and sort by location, category, price, rating and more;
A personal calendar that shows the user’s booked events throughout the holiday season;
A wishlist that lets users save their favorite events and share them with their friends and family via social media or messaging apps;
An AI feedback system that summarizes ratings and reviews from users and displays them as a single review that covers the main features, problems and compliments.
A user-curated itinerary page that allows users to create, view and share with others their top choices for specific occasions, places or themes.

The Project

All of my research and specifications for the project are here on Medium, but all of the visuals (personas, user flow, color palette, high-fidelity designs & landing page) can be found at this Figma link.

Conclusion

Working on this entry for the Uxcel 2023 Design Contest has been such an incredible learning experience, and I am happy to say I’ve finally finished it!

With the immense support of friends and family during this holiday season (which included graduation, loads of events & the pent up stress from 2023) I was able to pour all of myself into this project. Some things were not the way I envisioned them to be, and that’s okay.

I thank the Uxcel Team for this opportunity and want to let them know we’re waiting for more!

Happy Holidays,

Rebeca