The Problem
The current smartphone apps available on the market include a variety of productivity tools, but as of December 2017, none address event planning in a comprehensive, yet tailored fashion. The last five years have seen the market adopt many promising technologies, including cloud document sharing (Google Drive) and augmented messaging softwares (GroupMe and Slack); however, no similarly accessible, free, and collaborative tool has been created for event planning. This is the problem I am working to solve.
Why Me
My background equips me uniquely to address this gap in the productivity tool market. I have four years’ event experience co-planning TEDxUGA 2014-2017 and a 209-guest wedding, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Public Relations with an emphasis on new media.
In conclusion, the chief aim of this project (which for now, I am calling “Vento”) is to create a free-of-cost, accessible resource to everyday personal and professional event planners, with all of the features they seek and nothing else. The goal of the design is to be simple, colorful, and intuitive for easy grasp across levels of technical literacy.
Creating Vento has been a great test of my design skills, and in the process I have learned more about Adobe XD, Keynote, and the Apple UI kit than I had ever known before.
2017, it’s been real. Now, if you don’t mind, crunch time is over, and I’m off to look at my wedding photos for the first time. 🙂
Links! Links for everyone!
Design a Day journals (aka the 10 previous posts of this blog)
Final project
- Survey questions and results
- Wireframe, featuring bonus features
- Prototype
- User stories (see below):
- As a first time event planner, I want to add my family members so that they can help me.
- Solution: tiered, team-based profiles
- As an experienced event planner, I want to be able to communicate with vendors in an orderly fashion.
- Solution: vendor chat feature with document attachment support
- As a young bride, I want to be able to keep a close eye on how much I owe vendors (and how much I’ve already paid).
- Solution: budget feature
- As an elder without much technology experience, I want to invite my family to a reunion and be able to know who’s attending.
- Solution: Red Light / Green Light attendance tracker
- As a team member, I want to see when my boss has assigned me tasks, and to know when she’s happy with the work.
- Solution: Tasks feature
- As a parent, I want to stay in the loop for my son’s wedding without getting directly involved.
- Solution: “Guest” profile type