HOLI FESTIVAL
15 days
Mobile
2 Designers
Design thinking
Figma
Creating a must have feature for a mobile companion app intended to Holi goers.
Summary
The pandemic brought cultural experiences to another level. One that never before had we witnessed or even imagined! Communication alongside innovation have become key factors for the survival of the cultural industry. Event’s digital presence is no more a nice-to-have, but rather digital has become “the new norm” and shape of these events.
As part of my UX/UI bootcamp at Ironhack, my teammate and I have been required to dive deep into all 5 phases of design thinking, in order to craft an user-centric mobile application that would foster a more engaging and seamless event experience for event goers. More specifically, we have been asked to ideate an innovative digital feature addressing event attendees’ needs, to be incorporated in this event companion app.
After conducting secondary research, we decided to work on the Holi festival who took place on the 26th of May 2024 in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris. This regular and large scaled cultural event traditionally celebrated every year during the transition from winter to spring, is stretched on a huge ground with many cultural activities happening simultaneously. It brings together around 25000 to 30000 attendees from all-ages, mainly from the Indian community living in France, but also numerous non-Indian people who love the Indian culture.
Despite one basic landing page accessible from the Jardin d’Acclimatation website, there is no dedicated website, ticketing system, nor mobile application to accompany Holi event goers.
Target Users
To learn more about the needs and pain points of Holi festival’s goers, we performed an user research including a quantitative survey among 20 people and 5 individual qualitative interviews, with both Indian respondents who already attended the Holi, and non-Indian respondents who never attended it but who had considered to do so.
We reached our specific audience buy sharing our survey on expats and on Indian community groups, through several social platforms.
Our quantitative survey helped to validate our assumptions, and to identify among our respondents what are the most important factors when they decide to attend an event, as well as their most encountered problems at the Holi festival:
Our interviews enabled to come out with 3 main insights:
From the event awareness and ticket purchasing until on-premise navigation, the attendee journey is very fragmented
There are many frustrations like finding concise information, trace back tickets, locate and schedule activities, and navigate on-premise
The non-Indian people who never attended the Holi would need guidance to become more familiar with this cultural event
Meet "Enthusiastic Lucas", our primary persona
Lucas' Journey Map
Based on Lucas' profile, we created his user journey map and identified at each stage what were the main frustrations and the main opportunities before to ideate on the solution. According to the project requirements, we decided to focus on "navigation-on-premise" stage.
Lucas experiences an emotional rollercoaster related to his unawareness with Holi festival activities, location, and schedule, which results in a highly fragmented navigation on-premise.
With this in mind, we defined our problem statement as: "Non-Indian cultural enthusiasts need to find a way to get more familiar with Holi festival and to improve their navigation on-premise".
We brainstormed the solutions by doing a Crazy 8s activity before to prioritise the features of our Minimum Viable Product using the Moscow map.
Our MVP was defined as: "a companion application that will enable Holi goers to get more familiar with the on-premise navigation and cultural happenings, providing an interactive map and real-time activity information and schedule for the Holi goers. The users would be able to locate themselves in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, to generate their own "personalised journey" based on their time window and their cultural interests, as well as to have a real-time navigation guidance on-premise."
Design decisions
We built an user flow to show a detailed expression of our user happy path:
The user arrives on the homepage, he clicks on "My journey" icon from the navigation bar, he enables its location, and completes his time window. Then, he selects several cultural activities in accordance with its interests.
The application then generates its personalised journey displayed on the interactive map, coupled with a modulable list of activities and a real-time navigation guidance.
Low fidelity wireframes
Based on our user flow, we have sketched our low fidelity wireframes and we conducted 3 concept testing sessions to validate our concept. A number of needs and areas of improvement were identified to improve the experience, such as:
To have text explanations regarding the journey personalization feature
To have an information icon next to each cultural activity
To offer the possibility of : reordering the activities, add more activities, go back to previous step
To provide a declination of the feature in case of disabled location
Empirical Iterations
Mid fidelity wireframes
Based on our concept test feedbacks, changes were incorporated to our mid-fidelity wireframes, and further in person and remote testings were done. After having conducted 6 mi-fidelity usability testing sessions, additional areas of improvements were unveiled, especially:
To simplify and homogenise our time selection feature
To incorporate a drag & drop interaction for activity reordering instead of a number stepper
Brand attributes
After mid-fidelity wireframes testing, we reflected on our brand attributes and user interface design.
On the basis of the existing Jardin d’Acclimatation webpage and keeping in mind the fun, joyful, and colourful atmosphere at the root of the Holi tradition, we composed our moodboard:
High fidelity wireframes
The overall functionality was improved in our high fidelity screens, by incorporating a "home" icon into our menu bar, by simplifying our time selector tool, by fixing the activity reordering feature with a drag and drop interaction, and by repositioning the add activity feature to avoid confusion with the zoom control on the interactive map.
The buttons formatting was also homogenised, the interactive maps were enriched with coloured iconography, and several media were incorporated to enhance the user experience, especially with autoplaying videos on the homepage and the slide-up information pages.
Interactive prototype
Lucas arrive on the homepage, he goes to "My Journey" page and follows the steps to enable its location and get a personalised itinerary based on his time window and the activities he has previously selected. He reorganises the activities according to its priority, by drag and dropping the 2nd activity to 3rd position. After having started his journey, Lucas attends all the activities, by simply following the directional arrows provided on the interactive map, and sees his position evolving in real-time while he progresses from an activity to another.
Learnings & Next steps
Designing a new feature to accompany the Holi festival wasn’t a linear process, especially because reaching our specific audience was not as straight forward as we initially thought. The main goal of our project was to design a feature that would enhance the Holi festival experience, by solving identified frustrations of event goers. We managed to bring a personalization feature that will enhance event goers navigation on-premise, even if our high-fidelity prototype is still in progress considering my own requirement level.
Our usability testing sessions have demonstrated a real interest for this solution, especially for people going to Holi festival for the first time without having knowledge of how the area is organised.
Besides, it enabled to identify further improvements that could be made to bring more value:
Real-time crowd levels and estimated wait time for each activity
Time and distance provided with each personalised itinerary
Multiple routes offerings
Incorporating these news features as next steps would require new iterations cycles and design changes, in order to come out with an enriched and even more user-centric end-product.
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