How I created a micro website in 12 days
Project: “Party Delight’s”
Design Team: One (me)
Time Frame: Two Weeks
Tools: Pen, Paper, Scissors, Omnigraffle
Client: Party Delights
The UK’s largest online retailer of party supplies, balloons, fancy dress, and personalised cards. Next day delivery available on everything! Party Delights is very famous not just for the convenient prices and for the wide range of choice, but also for the fast delivery.
Brief: Create a easy way for users to organise a party using Party Delights.
Persona: The rappresentation of the typical Party Delights user is Gayles. She is 24 years old, she is a surveyor and she cares about: socialising and traveling.
“I love hosting parties at homes. Themes are always fun…”
- Organising 2 parties a year around different themes
- Her friends love surprise
- She love find new party idea
- She need a help to create great party and manage it
She always feels she ends up carrying more of the financial burden
Hipotesys: To help to Gayle’s manage her party planning,
and make sure she doesn’t bear all costs.
have a friends’ track, to know who’s coming and who’s not. she would love to politely split the costs with people joining the party but she doesn’t know how to do it easily.
Market Research
I started my research studying Party Delights most important competitors. Searching in the web site, I could realise that the major direct competitors in UK are PartyRama.co.uk and Escapade. The indirect competitors are Amazon and Facebook (event).
PartyRama and Escapade don’t have any option to organize party and to split the cost with the people invited. But PartyRama and Amazon in contrast with PartyDelights and Escapade can save feature with the wishlist and see the previous purchase. But the only one that is able to create event and manage the invitations and the guest list is Facebook. No one of them has the option to split the cost with other friends or collaborators.
User Journey
I decided to study the user journey of Gayle choosing a party theme
for a Halloween event and number of guest to understand how she can feel during this process.
for a Halloween event and number of guest
This process was divided in 3 different big steps:
1. “I want to plan a party and look for ideas
2. I want to track guest number and split the cost
3. I want to receive the order
When she think to have a party and start to looking for multiple sites for inspiration she’s feeling exited and creative. During the second step she start to think about the invitation and the guest list. In this point she don’t have to forget no one. Her humor at the moment is a little bit worried, a more friend she put in her list, more is the frustration to don’t manage all of this invitation and don’t have track of the different invited. Also she realise that like always she will end up carrying more of the financial burden. “This is so unfair”. But after this bad feeling though she is 100% positive her party will be a success and she buys the perfect items for her theme party. So she pays and is happy because she is looking forward to receive all the items and organise the party.
As you can see in the graph there unhappiness when she has to track the list of guest and split the cost.
My Goals:
1. Finding a way to keep track of who is coming.
2. Making it easy and quick to invite friends.
3. Spliting the costs with the collaborators.
Generate Ideas
The Design Studio was very helpful to understand the concept. I started with my colleges to create different sketches, based on the hypothesis to help Gayle compare different items during her online shopping.
We tested with multiple users and after some development it was much more clear understand the layout to use for my new concept.
Wireframe
In this step I create the wireframe with a digitalisation of the home page, focusing my study on the option to invite friends, track them and split the costs with the collaborators.
I tested it with more then 15 users and I took note about feedbacks and their experience.
In the second step I developed the wireframe and I created the new one with multiple improvements. In the pop-up of the party page I changed the size of the calendar, which took too much space and I put the focus on the graph showing the number of people who had confirmed, denied or were still undecided. Also the option to split costs with other guest was accessible only with Facebook and then needed to implement another source much more accessible to everyone, such as the email address. After the management of the friends and the cost, many users were undecided whether to click OK as found difficulties’ in understanding how to return to the previous page.
The prototype
The final version of the prototype is available from this link: https://invis.io/ZQ48LJ7G7
Future addition
In the future I’m going to change the page of the party and make it much more visual and intuitive for Gayle.
Also on the same vein I’m going to add the button to manage the guests and the cost, placing it more ‘central in the page “My Party” and facilitating the call to action zooming the button.
Finally the big step will be ‘to create the same version of Party Delights desktop website in Mobile Web version for two reasons: first is that mobile is the future and second is that Gayle loves to use his phone to manage its needs.
