Lo-Fi Party Planning Microsite for Selfridges
brief
Problem & Opportunity
For my first website project at General Assembly, I developed a party planning microsite for Selfridges —a luxury brand department store. As part of my brief, I was asked to create features and user flows that would allow users to:
- Get inspiration for party themes and advice on party planning
- Find themes and related products, and generate options within a certain budget
- Estimate costs for achieving the theme given the number of guests
- Invite and track guests and send reminders
- Split the cost with friends
My Role
This was a solo project and my process for developing a solution included:
- analysing competitors
- conducting user research
- identifying common pain points and needs
- developing concept maps
- creating user flows
- designing wireframes
- testing and iterating screens
- producing a prototype
- presenting to stakeholders
- Tools I used: paper, pen and Omnigraffle.
personas
For this brief, I was given three personas, and I studied them to understand common pain points and needs in party planning. Based on their respective budgets and interests, I decided to focus on "Willow" as the key user persona as she had the largest budget, was a 24-year old fashion marketer, and shopped at luxury brands like Selfridges.
COMPETITION
I performed an analysis of competitors to Selfridges and in the party planning category — John Lewis, Non Stop Party Shop (in Kensington), and Amazon. They each provided a range of products, theme ideas, and good delivery services. But none of them yet offered a comprehensive way to plan your party to complement the user's shopping experience.
USER RESEARCH
To complement what I learned about the user personas, I interviewed 6 people who shared many of the same interests and painpoints in party planning. From this research, I concluded that these users:
- Loved exploring themes and finding products to deliver a holistic party experience — from tableware to costumes.
- Didn't like the admin that went along with party planning
“I love theme parties and finding the right decor but I also hate shopping and would rather be making fun cocktails at home for my friends.”
USER JOURNEY
After finishing a series of interviews with potential users and my competitive analysis, I wrote down some key takeaways and began sketching out a user journey for the process of planning a party. Staying on paper and Post-It in my thought process and designs allowed me to iterate ideas and flows easily and quickly. My user journey was linked to a task analysis which broke down the actions and related thoughts, feelings and touch points that a user experiences in their process of party planning.
User journey part 1 - with rows illustrating: journey steps, actions, thoughts, feelings, and touchpoints
User journey part 2 - WITH ROWS ILLUSTRATING: JOURNEY STEPS, ACTIONS, THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, AND TOUCHPOINTS
user flows
Once I had a sense of the user journey, I began developing some initial user flows to show how a user could solve these four problems:
- Choose a party theme & add guests
- Track invited guests & receive alerts if more party supplies needed
- Divide the cost of party supplies between a group of people
- Checkout
My user flow sketches included the following, for choosing a theme, from paper to final version:
rough sketch of initial user flow for choosing a party theme
Journeys & Painpoints
How to design a way to split the cost of a party was a particularly difficult challenge. Would people want to split the cost of the party prior to paying for products or afterwards? I first developed a user flow with the splitting happening before the purchase of items. I then went through a process of brainstorming and sketching with others in my class who were trying to solve the same challenge to see if we could come up with a common solution to this piece of the overall picture.
The design ‘studio’ was really helpful and again we stayed on paper to make the process quick and easy. We ultimately determined that splitting the cost prior to the payment for goods, using a party fund that all the co-hosts could contribute to, would be the easiest way to split the cost, helping the main host to avoid chasing flatmates around afterwards for their share of the party.
INTERFACE EXPLORATION
Once I was satisfied with the user flows, I began developing a series of screens to match each stage in the flows. Here’s the initial homepage screen. I thought that having a "My Party" widget on left to collect key planning elements at the start of the planning journey would be helpful for focusing users.
information architecture
I also conducted a “card sorting” activity with users, to see how people naturally sorted products into categories which led my development of the info architecture for the site.
To bring all the user flows, screens and information architecture together, I used Omnigraffle to create wireframes for the site.
TESTING & VISUAL ITERATIONS
I went through a few iterations of the wireframes, testing them on potential users and making changes to user flows and labels — all the while trying to keep my main user, Willow, in mind — how would she feel about this transition? Would this satisfy her need to split the cost? Does this way of selecting theme ideas feel intuitive and fun?
I shared my prototype with one of my users and she gave me valuable feedback on smoothing out certain flows, in particular, combining my the “My Guests” and “My Parties” sections of the Manage My Party area into one, so that the party specs, guests and product quantities could be seen in one place.
testing with a user
screen for managing parties & guests
proposed solution
From this point, I iterated the screens and designed a final wireframe proposal. In it I focused on bringing together key party planning elements into a widget, on left, similar to a trip planning site, where a user can indicate what they are looking for in a party. They can also get inspired and explore different themes through other parts of the homepage, or site. Then when they’re ready, they can go through the Party Planner.
Presentation
My final step in the process was to develop a presentation to summarize the work for my classmates and to present it to them as if they were clients for whom I was developing the app. I made notes of things to improve for the next presentation — including analysing non-direct competitors for the website, such as party planning sites like Paperless Post.
Next Steps
As a next step for the party planning site, I intend to continue testing the prototype and to smooth out any transitions between steps in the theme selection and party planning process. I also want to think of ways to bring the user’s voice even more into the process — perhaps allowing them to be a party ambassador for Selfridges and to be featured on the microsite.
I’ve also noted things for myself to continue practicing in the next project —
- Push myself to continue thinking outside the box for how to help a user solve their problem;
- Explore more ways to make an experience delightful; and
- Continue to resist any temptations to feel perfectionist about my work and be open to regular user feedback!
Looking forward to the next challenge.