Overview
I was approached by a charity to do design and build a website for their free street festival of diverse arts and culture. I spoke with stakeholders and festival-goers from the previous year to understand the needs for the site, and the problems with the site they had used for the previous year’s festival.
The main issue was that the site was not designed for mobile, so passers by who scanned the QR code for the site were greeted with an poor UX. This meant that the performance pitches were empty of spectators because no one could find or understand the timetable of events.
User Needs
"As a resident of Southwark interested in the festival I need a way to know what's happening, where and at what time so that I can attend the performances I'm interested in".
Action
By considering the evironment in which the site will be used (on mobile, spontaneously, by passers-by) we were able to more than double festival attendance according to the event organisers.
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The central idea for my design was that the timetable of events should be presented in a mobile friendly table, and the QR codes on physical flyers and posters advertising the event should take users straight to the content they needed to see (the timetable) rather than to a home page, so that users could easily see where they had to be and at what time.
Challenges
The main mechanism for findability was meant to be through QR codes printed and posted around the festival site and on flyers. I created the QR code and sent to the event organisers. Unfortunately, the organisers only printed one QR code and put it on a poster rather than on flyers. This meant that the site didn't get as much traffic as we had hoped. This highlighted for me the importance of close collaboration with the online and offline teams. The event organisers confirmed that the festival will go ahead next year with QR codes on the flyers.
Result
The QR codes were implemented and the event had over 2000 attendees over two days - the performance areas were full of people.
