Eventos

Where, what and when?

Eventos is an app that brings to life the events happening in Zagreb by providing an overview of a day-to-day activities classified by categories based on interests such as concerts, sport events, nightlife, culture, education, and much more.

‍

The challenge

The overall business challenge was to answer the question: Why is Events not succeeding even without any competition in the market?

As a UX designer, I had to identify the pain points of the existing product, and bring a more user centric approach to address the business challenge.

‍

Learning from the users and market

To find an answer to this challenge, I had to understand how Croatians live, what are their interests, how are their social interactions and how do they plan their leisure time.

We did this by conducting a quantitative research that would help us understand the target audience's social needs and behavioural patterns, as well as their expectations and then apply these knowledge to build a better Eventos app.

The results of the research led the direction of where we wanted to take the app. The learnings and feedback from users made us rethink the product’s vision, refine the target audience and address the pain points. This helped us in pivoting from the initial idea, with the hope of bringing a bit of life into the day-to-day routine of the Croatian capital.

‍

“Zagreb is a European capital, but is still a boring city”

“As a young couple with two kids, we don’t know where to go”

“We cannot plan ahead because the weather is constantly changing”

Artefacts / Eventos 2.0

At the same time when the team was structuring, gathering and analysing the research results, we created a customer journey map that could give us a more holistic overview of the current product, and how can we optimise certain flows to enhance the product.

Having identified users needs and pain points; we added all the feedback to the customer journey map. This exercise was the starting point for our product redesign and optimisation, and the first task was to restructure the IA (information architecture).

To enhance the user experience and keep Eventos on top of mind, we decided to add a ‘View mode’ (pre-logon mode), where users can explore and discover the events around them. This idea came up during one of the two co-creation workshops we held; where after a card sorting task, we noticed that several users wanted to have a sneak peek of the events (view mode) before deciding if they want to save the event or share it with their friends.

After deciding on the new IA structure of the app, it was time for the first pen and paper wireframes, to have the overall view of the new structure as well as keep in mind the enhancement related to new features coming down the roadmap.

UI Enhancement

During the interviews we noticed that Eventos was not perceived as a product that is in continuous evolution, and this perception had a negative impact on the product; the app was only used a couple of times after download, and forgotten about it.

This negative perception was one of the main pain points of the app, I had it in mind during the entire research and exploration process; and I wanted to also address it with some interface enhancement. It was a difficult battle for me as I had to convince the stakeholders that enhancing the UI would be the cherry on top of the cake, and could be beneficial for us to revert the negative perception users had about the product.

The UI enhancement came along with some sleek iconography, illustrations and micro-interactions, and that can create the delight that was missing in the app.

Future

The Eventos team has a well thought and ambitious growth plan. After launching Eventos 2.0 they next step is to expand the to other locations within Croatia, and later the rest of the Balkans. Along with this strategy, the team has also a plan to grow the product by adding new features heard from users feedback, e.g. adding a weather widget in the app,  business features such as promotions and partnership features such as payments and discounts.

‍