Digitizing Regional Culinary Experiences
Showing the best of Austin’s Food and Wine Festival
The Austin Food and Wine Festival is an event hosted by the Austin Food and Wine Alliance. The event features the best of Austin's thriving culinary scene and is looking for ways to digitally promote the attractions and to support local business and community.
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My team and I combined in depth research with intuitive navigation and captivating visuals to modernize and streamline the festival experience. By creating a well designed platform, it allowed attendees to participate with confidence, convenience, and understanding of the venue's mission statements
Project Details
Team
UX Designer
Duration
2 Weeks
Role
UX Researcher, Project Manager, UI Illustrator, Presenter
Methods
User Interviews, Heuristic Evaluation, Task Analysis, Competitive & Comparative Analysis, Affinity Mapping, Personas, MoSCoW Prioritization, User Flows, Sketching & Wireframing, Style Guide, Rapid Prototyping, Usability Testing, Double Diamond.
Tools
Figma, Google Docs, Trello, Zoom, Slack, Photoshop, Illustrator, Miro, Mural, Google Slides
Discovery and Research
What is the issue?
The Austin Food & Wine Festival is a three-day event filled with delicious food, wine tasting, celebrity guest chefs, and more. Our goal was to optimize the mobile experience for attendees and to highlight the festival partnership its founder non-profit organization: The Austin Food & Wine Alliance.
The Challenge
The Festival's mobile and desktop functionality is a frustrating experience as it lacks information and features to navigate. This makes it difficult for prospecting visitors to plan the event which wastes time and cause confusion. These negative experiences are a huge opportunity loss to promote its regional culinary wonders and its alliance community goals. So our objective is to help attendees save time, have clear navigation, get informed with community goals, and attend their desired activities.
The Goals
Make important festival information easy to find
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Find easier ways for visitors to attend events
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Provide clear navigation to reduce wasted time and stress
Showcase the Alliance and their goals.
Discovery and Research
Finding Our Ideas
We looked at the issues with the digital platforms in order to define best practices we can use to improve its design.
Heuristics
We identified multiple issues through mobile and desktop testing. The current iteration had many dead sections with no information (such as purchasing tickets ). Others are buried within digital documents that are hard to access and harder to find. (Example: event schedules, guest information) Overall, its digital platforms are incomplete and largely inaccessible.
Competitive Analysis
We chose 4 food festivals as competitors to assess the industry standards. We conducted a plus and delta analysis to see what we can adapt to our design.
We discovered that each had:
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Visually appealing layout with clean alignments and content positioning.
Easy and Simple Navigation to all necessary features
Clear and detailed activity and business information
Discovery and Research
Understanding the People
"A Festival is a chance to experience something you wouldn't be able to find in your daily life...It's an exciting place where you get to explore new ideas and make connections. If the expectations creates a good experience...It might even become part of your interest in your daily life."
"Festivals can get really crowded...I don't really enjoy the food when I'm standing in a line, it's not the same as getting to sit down and relax...Always feel like you're scrounging up food to try everything in desperation. And then it gets hard to find some place to sit among the crowds of people."
"Food Festivals should dedicate its resources not only to the food or the products, but to the experiences itself because it leaves the visitors with a good impression and memory."
We sent out a survey about the typical festival experience and narrowed down to 4 users fitting our target user criteria. Our interviews looked into how they learned about the event, planning habits, and common frustrations.
In addition, we had our users complete a task analysis comprising 4 tasks in a brief walk through of the original website. These included:
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Find the list of top restaurants and chefs
0 Completed
Find the events schedule
1 Completed
Find info about the Food and Wine Alliance
1 Completed
Find the Age Requirement for Entry
2 Completed
What we learned
Strong online and social media presence for planning
Planning is the most stressful experience for many users looking for information prior to the event. As such, we need to reduce the friction as much as possible by making the details easily accessible.
Lines and crowds are the largest stress factor
Many users were frustrated by human traffic in their past experiences, attributing to poor organization and no alternative to waiting. We wanted to challenge and find ways to reduce wait times or remove lines entirely.
Clear and concise navigation
Getting lost is a negative experience all users strongly expressed. They believed a good map is a necessary feature to help navigate the grounds. Frustration occurs when the map is illegible or if there was no intuitive way to locate themselves. We considered options to include an interactive map with options to assist the users with their needs.
Define and Ideate
The Fantastic Foodie
Define and Ideate
Setting our Objectives
With the research and user definition, we can identify the design decisions to improve the Festival experience.
So how might we...
Make the important festival information easy to find?
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Simplify the attendees’ planning process?
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Highlight the Austin Food & Wine Alliance?
The Priorities
The Solution
Increasing Map Clarity and Usability
Improving physical navigation will allow users to attend with less stress.
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Populating and improving missing or ambiguous information
Helps with planning and organization to ensure user confidence.
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Increasing time efficiency with options to digitally interact with events and activities
Implementing features to reduce crowds and increase user attendance.
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Improving overall navigation and visual aesthetics
Modernizing UI and Information Architecture for responsive design on the go.
Design and Develop
From Ideas to Craft
We started by conceptualizing our ideas in basic sketch, bridging the gap between visual and function while slowly updating each iteration through feedback and testing. With each round of test, we gradually improved our final product.
Starting with the Basics
We wanted to get a basic idea of the layout, orientation, and information architecture of the redesign.
Applying our research into visuals, we had a framework to develop on.
Adding Some Details
Next we increase the design to mid-fidelity where we will conduct testing to see how our designs work. In this stage, we defined all important call-to-action features and points to help our user navigate the application.
Testing our design
We invited 4 users that matched our persona criteria to test our designs. The users were tasked with 4 tasks to complete.
Add a Chef to the Itinerary
3 Completed
Sign in to an event
4 Completed
Purchase a Ticket
4 Completed
Reserve some sample wines
4 Completed
Feedback and Improvement
Through testing, we discovered avenues of improvement. Moving towards finishing our design, we decided to:
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Remove the itinerary from the talents page and added it as “view itinerary” in the navigation drop-down menu
Users were confused to its purpose. We clarified the wording and placed it in a separate location to make clear how to use this feature.
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Put a search bar in the talents directory and information about each chef
This helped users sort through the massive roster of talents to find the ones they want. It also allowed us to incorporate preview features on their profile.
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Updated the map filter to be pulled up instead of a separate screen to avoid confusion.
This gives the user more clarity with inputting information and less obstruction to navigation.
Design and Develop
Finalizing the Design
Delivering and Closing Thoughts
The Grand Finale
Check out our Prototype!
Our next event - The Next Steps
Our next steps are based on issues we didn't involve much with due to constraints. These include:
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Work on perfecting the UI layout and typography including some buttons, pages, and sizing.
Expand on features to include additional services like parking or help information.
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Improve on ensuring ADA compliance
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Expand the desktop version
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Additional testing to discover further improvements
Reflections
Empathy is the spirit of the design
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At first glance, much of my focus were about making the design look nicer without much consideration about the multitude of missing or broken features. By understanding why and what people look for, it contextualized what are the things people find important to guide our direction.
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MVP and Planning is the mind of the design
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There were many avenues and functions we'd love to implement with this project, many we regrettably had to ignore due to constraints. By defining the minimum value to attain, it helped us work efficiently and with focus to create something nice; with even time to spare to sprinkle in the ideas we previously sidelined.
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Testing is the soul of the design
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Getting feedback and opinion was arguably the greatest critique throughout the project. It reaffirms things we've done right but also highlight things we could improve. It helps validate our progress and constantly make the right changes.
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Closing Thoughts
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Overall, I'm deeply satisfied with this project. It gave me an opportunity to improve an experience that will have impact on a community. It gives meaning to the work and I learned a lot in the process. I plan to apply this newfound knowledge to my future works.