UI/UX case study: BUSQ cultural tracking app

When someone starts looking for things to do in a city, or even in a neighboorhood, they usually open the Instagram app or Twitter in order to find interesting stuff. Most times these events and places are all around profiles that have no connection between them, and so begins an exausting search for these cultural activities. The application I designed is supposed to fix exactly this issue, and in this process alowing users to have this experience as a social network, connecting with friends to find and give reviews of their favorites activies and ultimately creating an informal diary of the city through the perspective of different people.

Defining the problem

Usually in the UX methodology the first thing you do when desining a new app or feature is define a problem. In this case, I looked around my environment to search for some experience problems that me and the people around me used to complain about. I got to the idea of creating an app that allows it's users to find cultural activities — and the experience people had there — due to the main problem: the dificulty many people, specially the young, have in acessing cultural spaces as such as museums, events, movie theaters or even parks and recreation places.

Defining the stakeholders and protopersonas

The goal here was to find the parts interested in my project. First, I defined my target public, the main stakeholders, and the people that would be in contact with the users, the secundary stakeholders, who would be responsible for delivering what the main users need. Next, I created a protopersona of a person I would be designing for. I listed her behaviours and motivations, necessities and goals.

Benchmark and Desk Research

Here, I looked around the internet to find more information about the main problem. I seacherd for competitors on the cultural activities plataforms and realized that these products are more company-focused and not so much user-focused, leaving the social and user experience in the background. The companies were: Google, Catraca Livre, Eventbrite and Sympla. I also made a desk research to be able to see the true basis of the problem and to make sure that it is a worth theme to be worked on — it turned out to be — .

User Research

Methodology

In the beggining of the user research, I had to think about the methodology I would use in the process. I decided to perform a survey and in-deapth interviews to gain quantitative and qualitative data on how the people involved in the cultural sector feel, behave and experience their lifes in it. Trying to understand especially the pain points and struggles they share.

User Survey and Analisis part. 1

24 users participated the survey — you can access it via this link — . Here's the main results:

• The majority of the participants were young people of 25 to 30 years;
• 41.7% would gain up to one minimum wage;
• They like to participate in cultural activities once per week, with a preference for bars, music venues and parties;
• In the mobility aspect, most of them live between 1km to 10km of distance from these places and use ride apps to get there (75%);
• More than half (54.5%) of the interviwees have problems finding activities of their interest and uses mostly Instagram and Twitter to find out about them;
• The main motivation for going out was to keep in touch with their friends and make new ones, and to keep up with the culture through music, arts and conversations;
• Lastly, almost all interviwees complained about apps with a similar approaches to the one a proposed. They said these apps are functional but never deliver what they are looking for because of poor UX, lack of personalized filters and categories, and misses the networking aspect of these activities.

User Survey and Analisis part. 2

For this part, I had an in-deapth interview with four people to have more specific insights on how my users behave and interact with apps and websites that are already on the market. The results were similar to the ones I found out on the survey, as I used the same last three questions, but here I was able to dive deeper into the questions and could see that they all were very unsatisfied with the existing products experiences.

The social aspect was punctuated by all four interviwees, and two of them mentioned the Facebook events as something they liked and missed on their lifes. So, from these interviews, the social network aspect was a must feature in the app.

Personas and Empathy Maps

Going further on the research, I defined two personas which have different needs and goals and are more complex than the protopersona I imagined before. This will help me improve and personalize the experience each user will have further on the project.

User Journey Map

A user journey is a visual story on how the personas would find my product. On both situations, Luana and João are frustrated with the current experience to fulfill their needs. At the end of the story map, both of them would have discovered an easier way to engage with their needs using my application.

Pain Points and Solutions

Concluding the research phase, I observed the pain points were the following:

• Complex apps;
• Lack of personal filters;
• Lack of social features;
• Poor documentation of activities/communication with the public;

And I deduced the users needed three major improvements from the current state of things:

• Search feature with personal filters and categories;
• Publications in order to create an informal diary of the city's activities;
• A social feature to help engage users and cultural producers.

User Interface Design

Information Architeture

There would be three main journeys flows on the app:

1. A personalized search for an activitie of the user's interest, including date, price, distance and tags;
2. Publish a experience that includes their rating and review;
3. Look for a friend's profile and see their activities.

Wireframes

While keeping in mind the user's pain points and motivations, I designed the first wireframes which would be used later for the usability tests.

Later on, I designed others elements to give details to the app to make it more complex and visualy appealing. But for now, these would fit the purpose of the upcoming tests.

Usability Tests

The main goal here was to find out if the users could complete the main flows without much problems or doubts on where they should go next.

I conducted the tests with three participants and the findings are listed below:

• Simple and intuitive interface;
• There should be more sessions on the search page;
• The order of the categories on the search page should be changed and improved;
• Overall an easy flow to be executed.

With this feedback, I revisited the app and updated the areas that required changes in order to improve the app's perfomance and user satisfaction.

UI Kit

The color and typography choices I made were based on the feeling I wanted my users to have while experiecing the product. The color blue is associeted mostly with open spaces, freedom, imagination and trust, while the green is connected to nature, growth and freshness. Those were the two principal colors in the project. In the typography aspect, I found the DM Sans was a perfect fit because, beyond the fact it is a sans serif font — these are more legible! — , it is very welcoming and friendly.

Prototype

You can access the high fidelity prototype by clicking here!

Disclaimer: the photos and event posters were taken from the internet.

Takeaways

There's still a lot of features and screens that I want to implement on BusQ, it's a very complex app! As an UX/UI Designer I would be happy to do more researchs, interviews and usability tests to understand my public and improve the app as long as it needs to. Besides, I do belive the problem raised in the beginning of the research was solved with this product.

Through this, I learned a lot about the UX experience, understanding that one of the most important things — maybe the most important — is the user research phase, where I got in contact with my user and uderstood their needs. With this information I was able to plan all the features and visual of the app based on their experience.