BLKCTY
START-UP WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT
Project Overview
BLKCTY Video Walkthrough
Challenge: BLKCTY, a new start-up, wanted to create an event page as a solution to the following problem space:
Many young Black American professionals move to Minneapolis without a network. The lack of a network often leads to them feeling alone in the city. Those who don’t find a network often leave.
While there are a number of event pages, there are not many that cater to Black Americans, and make events easily searchable. So event planners may have a hard time connecting with their audiences and audiences may have a hard time finding the events.
Solution: I conducted user research and produced an interactive prototype of BLKCTY.com to determine website features and assist in the creation of a user-friendly event page.
Methods: Deep Dive , Competitive Audit, Directed Story Telling, Card Sorting, Persona Development, and Journey Mapping
Tools: Sketch, Invision, Keynote
Deliverables: Presentation & Invision Prototype
Review - Learning what exists
To determine what kind of an event page would be attractive and useful for users, I developed research questions. The questions functioned as a way to guide my research.
To both gather inspiration and see what other event sites existed in the Twin-cities as well as other mid-size and large cities, I performed a deep dive and compiled features and designs that stood out.
Persona development gave me insight into where a user might start their event search and how they might utilize event pages.
Conducting directed storytelling interviews as well as a card sort activity allowed me to gather additional insights.
CARD SORT ACTIVITY: Users were given the following scenario and asked to complete 2 tasks. Scenario: It is a typical day and you are looking for events to go to throughout the the month online.Task 1: Please choose the top five event categories that would be of interest to you. Task 2: Now please choose the the top 5 event categories that would be of least interest
From my interviews the insight that stood out the most was that: people ultimately decided to go to events if they had someone to go with, if they knew someone that was going to be there, or they were familiar with the event environment. This information helped me develop features and determine what was important to include in the design.
Prototyping - Bringing life to the vision
Based on what I learned I incorporated the following unique features into the design:
Easy event upload from event posters.
Event host log-in for easy event posting and host recognition across events.
Easy event sharing for website visitors
An essential experience page that caters to visitors and those that are new to the city, so they know the essential places to visit when in the city (voted on by users through social media).
News content , most likely from local news sources.
A place where website visitors can see the most popular events as well as event hosts.
