Meetup Feature Integration (Conceptual)

Project Overview:

Product type: App | Duration: 10 days | Tools: Sketch, InVision| Status: Ongoing

My role(s)

On a team of three, I shared the roles of researcher, designer, and usability tester. In addition, I enjoyed sharing the role of project manager with my team and helping to set standards in communication and organization. Emily championed setting our design standards, for which I’m very grateful.

Limitations, parameters, resources, and materials

Some of the major limitations was our experience with Sketch and InVision, which lead to some major time-consuming overhauls in the design process.

Initial problem statement

The client assigned to our team was Meetup.com, which is a platform that enables people with similar hobbies and/or interests connect and gather in-person.

When meetup group organizers require a space to hold their gathering they need to search for a venue on their own. Likewise, businesses that would like to host a meetup need to find and reach out to organizers directly. How might we help connect the meetup organizers to willing hosts through meetup’s existing platform to simplify and streamline the process for both parties?

Confirming and refining our initial assumptions

To test our initial assumptions, my team put together a screener survey (in Google Forms) to find qualified people to conduct user testing. Qualified in this case meant someone either has an event space (and potentially uses meetup.com already to attract business), and meetup.com organizers. We posted the form on our social media platforms and received 39 responses. 13 of them fit the bill and interviewed six venue owners and seven meetup organizers.

Through interviews, we were able to both confirm and refine our initial assumptions. Both venue owners and users wanted to connect more easily as well as find connections with common interests to broaden their communities. Each party’s pain points differed, naturally; venue owners wanted trustworthy groups, and the larger venues, especially, needed to ensure the meetup event would bring in enough revenue. Meetup organizers were concerned with easily finding venues that met their group’s size, budget, and preferred location. Organizers also wanted transparency with pricing, given their prior experiences having to negotiate on pricing for a space.

User Interviews

This refinement came from the following questions asked during user interviews:

Meetup organizers:

1. How long have you been using meetup.com?
2. For what groups are you an organizer?
3. How do you go about searching for a venue to host your meetup event?
4. What do you take into consideration when booking a venue?
5. How was the experience booking the venue? How was the communication? Negotiation of rate for the event? Execution (how did it actually end up going day-of)?
6. Is there is anything we have not touched on or that you’d like to talk about?
7. What is your experience using meetup.com?

Venue owners:

1. What do you do at the establishment. What are some of the responsibilities?
2. How have event organizers found you for past events?
3. To your knowledge, have you hosted any events from meetup.com?
4. How has working with the event organizer or a meetup organizer been for one of the last events held at your space? What were the challenges?
5. Have you reached out to event organizers directly to bring groups/events to your space? Could you describe any specific methods/strategies?
6. Are you looking to have more events hosted at your space? Why or why not?

Refined Problem Statement

When putting together an event or a meetup, organizers have the daunting task of finding, assessing, and negotiating a space that fits their needs. There are many hosts willing to service those needs, however, smaller venues require trustworthy and accountable organizers and larger venues require a monetary commitment and contract from organizers to meet their daily revenue goal.

How might we help connect meetup organizers to willing hosts with detailed information and connect hosts with verified, committed meetup organizers?

Sketches

Our team focused on features venue owners and meetup organizers separately, initially. We started with topic maps for each group.

Topic map of all possible features for the Meetup Organizers

Topic map of all possible features for the venue owners

Utilizing the MoSCoW method to prioritize features, we decided upon the following features to focus on to start designing the initial wireframes:

Meetup Organizer, Must’s:

1. Search (with filter for location, occupancy capacity, price, and type of space)
2. Contact info
3. Venue info

Meetup Organizer, Should’s:

1. Reviews
2. Amenities (of venue)
3. Venue availability
4. Photos of venue
5. Nearby public transportation
6. Chat (with venue) in-app

Venue Owner, Must’s:

1. Ratings (for organizers)
2. Type of Meetup event
3. Business page
4. Account (to collect deposits)

Venue Owner, Should’s:

1. Means to find organizers

The team held a design studio to hit the ground running, which led to the coalescence of feature designs and user flows.

To guide our wireframes in Sketch, we drafted finalized hand-drawn wireframes, here’s a small sample:

Initial wireframes for the venue owners to search for Meetup groups

These were then translated into digitized wireframes in Sketch, here’s a small sample (most of which align with the drawn-out wireframes above):

Afterwards, we brought the wireframes into InVision in order to begin usability tests. You can find our first prototype, built in InVision, here.

Usability Tests and Resulting Iterations

Our objective with the first round of usability testing was to validate key features, namely, the search function (for both venues owners and meetup organizers), connecting via chat, and finally, sending and requesting a deposit to secure an event space.

The tasks for organizers ran as such:

1. SCENARIO: More people have joined your “Dogs at Church” group! There are actually 50 people now and their dogs! There are too many members to fit in your apartment and you need to find a venue for tonight’s meetup. You’re willing to splurge on the space, but it must be nearby and allow for dogs. Your friend, Carl, who is handicapped, is also coming / TASK:
   Find a space that meets your criteria and that’s available this evening. Connect with the venue owner to go over any details.
2. SCENARIO: You and the venue owner are in complete accordance! You’re all set to secure the space for your event tonight. / TASK: Go ahead and secure your space with the required down payment.
3. SCENARIO: You really value seeing the ratings for the venues and want to give your own feedback; you’ve been notified that you still have outstanding feedback to provide. / TASK: Leave your feedback for a venue where you recently held an event.

The tasks for organizers ran as such:

1. SCENARIO: It’s only been two days since you added your restaurant on Meetup.com and you already have several booking requests! / TASK:
   Find the booking requests, decide on one to accept, and ensure you get your deposit.
2. SCENARIO: You’re going to look for possible meetup events that could be hosted at your restaurant. As a reminder you’re interested in hosting events that would likely increase your regular customer base and in order to make any sort of profit, you’d need a group of more than 150 people that’s willing to pay $200 or more. / TASK:
   Find a group that meets your criteria and reach out to that group’s organizer.
3. SCENARIO: You valued knowing the level of professionalism and trustworthiness of the groups you worked with recently and want to contribute your feedback on your own experiences. / TASK:
   Leave a review for a group that recently held an event at your restaurant.

The results were exciting in how revealing they were. As far as pure success rates go, the design did pretty well:

1. Locate pending booking requests, accept, and request deposit (success 3 / failure 1)
2. Find a group and connect with organizer (success 4 / failure 0)
3. Locate reviews in notifications and leave for (success 4 / failure 0)

But, when you look at how well these tasks were completed, the success rate plummets:

1. Finding pending venue space booking requests (3 out of 4 users had difficulty)
2. Navigating to a non-existent central/homepage page navigate through the app (3 out of 4 users)
3. Understanding where to find past events that need reviews (4 out of 4 users)

For the initial design, we decided since this was a feature integration, we would maintain the five navigation icons in the tab. The results of the first round of usability testing showed us that these icons were not transferrable from the app’s current user to the potential new users.

We did another round of feature topic mapping, MoSCoW-method prioritization, and finally two rounds of design studio to decide on the next iteration. The key changes made was a central homepage for users to access key features that weren’t in the tab bar: events/bookings, money-related items (deposits, past payments made/received), and reviews. In the tab bar, we changed the icons to more clearly represent what one would find in them, such as messages with an envelope icon; we also added a home button so users could quickly navigate back to the central page.

The second design iteration included these design changes and was brought into higher fidelity. This was fairly simple given Meetup’s current app design: minimalist, mostly white, with some images, and the distinct pink color for CTA and headers. You can view the final prototype, also made in InVision, here.

With the same scenarios and tasks, we found the second iteration provided a much better experience, but would need more testing before we can green-light the feature. As for results, here are a few key findings:

1. Locating pending booking requests/accepting and requesting a deposit (success 3 / failure 2)
2. Finding a group and connecting with organizer (success 2 / failure 3)
3. Locate reviews in notifications and leave for organizer (success 4 / failure 1)

As for Urgent issues that would need to be addressed for the third iteration:

1. How to find venues and organizers/changing the location of the search icon (5 out of 5 users did not use this when asked to look for venues/organizers)
2. Where to put booking requests from organizers (3 out of 5 users went elsewhere or could not find booking requests, which was under “events”)

Reflection

This was my first team project, coming from a startup where I corresponded, at most, on my projects. I feel really lucky it went as smoothly as it did. We quickly took on the needed roles and tried to switch responsibilities up to ensure everyone practiced the new learnt skills such as Sketch and InVision. We experience what most teams likely do which was a balance of different strengths, weaknesses, and priorities; for example, some were more detail-oriented/willing to spend time that was better spent elsewhere, which was championed by the more practical team members. The balance was energizing, honestly. This balance, and our hard deadlines, enabled us to put our heads down and work tirelessly to produce the best solution.