sidekick is an event planning app that will help you find events, keep track of things you want to do in your city, and help you plan them with friends.
You’re the hero organizing and we’re your sidekick.
Timeline
September - December 2019
January - May 2020
Concept Ideation
Ethnographic Research
User Interviews
Personas
Journey Maps
Sitemap
Low-fi Wireframes
Low-fi Wireframes
Testing, Round 1
Branding
High-fi Wireframes
Testing, Round 2
Team
Tools
Adobe XD
Adobe Illustrator
Challenge
As college students living in a city, we found that the experience of finding events could be much improved. Then, after finding one, the process of planning out all the details with a group of people leads to more difficulties. Through our experiences and talking to friends, we found that this is a problem we could solve. We wanted to create a platform where users can plan for these events, and moreover, any activity, like a weekend ski trip.
Elevator Pitch
sidekick
is the only curated event finding and activity planning app
that filters out bad and unwanted events specified by the user, leaving only quality ones and allowing you to plan and organize personal activities
for group of friends that want to explore their city and the individual that keeps track of their bucketlists
in cities with young adults
who want to explore their city, find events to go to, and easily plan activities with friends
in the era of too many distracting and saturated event finding platforms and people not taking responsibility when planning activities in groups.
Process
We started with ethnographic research and surveys… how do people find events or plan activities now? After conducting more detailed interviews, we created personas and user journeys based on our data. We used this data to create wireframes.
After our first round of testing by asking users to fulfill tasks on our low-fi clickable prototype, we re-iterated based on their interactions and pain points. Talking to users and watching how they interact with our app is what I enjoy the most. I feel that we learn the most from this observation.
We then created our branding together, over FaceTime in April during quarantine. We had a lot of fun creating our sidekick, and a lot of hard work on getting it right. Throughout the process, we all worked together. However, this was the point where we started to take different responsibilities. Xoee created our amazing logo, while I continued the next iteration of our wireframes, creating as many screens as we could that were necessary to fulfilling the features we wanted out of our app.
User Surveys
We collected background information such as age, identified gender, what type of phone they have, and what type of area they live in.
How and when do users decide to share their location?
How do people find events?
How do people plan activities with friends… how they research it, what platform do they share information on, and how do they split payments?
Personas
Marcus, 34
Recently moved to Boston for a new job.
Trying to explore Boston but doesn't know what interesting things there are to do around town that aren’t touristy and typical. Excited to start exploring and wants to keep track of interesting things he’s found. Wants to reach out to the few people he does know but thinks it would be helpful to know what they are interested in.
Jessica, 22
Junior at Boston University.
Feels like they’ve never really explored their city beyond where their college is. Has a solid group of friends and they try to plan activities but they never work out because it’s hard to organize everything between them in a group chat. No one takes responsibility when organizing so they always end up at the same bar every weekend and going to the same restaurants over and over again.
Maggie, 24
Just started a new job in Boston.
The planner of their friend group. Likes to get her large group of friends together but finds it difficult to organize and keep track of all the details. Has so many group chats and notes on her phone but everything is disconnected.
User Journey
We wanted to map out the two main workflows (event finding and planning an activity). We presented scenarios for both of these use cases without our application and with it to demonstrate the difference our app makes in these experiences.
Sitemap
The sitemap was one of the first things we did together. Although it was an iterative process as we did more research and gained more insight into the space we were exploring.
Main Features
Event planning
Activity Planning
Chat Feature that pulls out important notifications and updates, reminders
Social Media / Profiles of Friends and their events/lists
Secondary Features
Onboarding
Creating Preferences
Fewer, Quality Events
A better event finding process showing you fewer quality events based on your preferences
Venmo Integration
Divide payments across whoever is added to it by payment
Scheduling
Doodle poll, when2meet
Notifications and reminders for friends to answer
Calendar Integration
Bucket List
Keeping track of your bucket list, seeing your friend
Branding
When thinking about our brand we started with asking questions about how the brand would feel rather than how it would look.
We brainstormed what images and themes we thought of when thinking about the app.
Logo
We explored everything from superheroes to SpongeBob’s Patrick to Aladdin’s Abu…
We came up with a parrot, a talking symbol of a helper… a sidekick
Xoee designed some amazing variations and we tweaked the designs together over FaceTime, as this part of the process was during the beginning of the pandemic.
We tested the designs with 12 users. We first showed them all in black and white, before showing them in two different color schemes. Getting their feedback about the black and white logos was helpful so we could see how the form of the logo was being perceived without having the very influential effects of color involved.
We asked users which birds they liked the most and why. What did the different logos make them feel and what would they expect from an app based on seeing this.
After showing them the black and white versions we showed them the same forms in two different color ranges, a warmer tone and a cooler tone. This step was helpful in hearing about the feelings that people felt when looking at these logos in color. Some peoples opinions completely flipped when they saw color versions of these logos and some peoples’ opinions were only validated when they saw color.
Our users felt that A and B were friendly. Most people liked the pink, purple color scheme over the blue, green. They felt that they seemed more alive.
F and H were disliked. They didn’t feel as friendly as the others, and they felt flat.
The other thing of note was that people really liked the gradients. It felt more dynamic and gave the bird more movement rather than the others.
After this testing, our team went back through and read our notes to figure out comment trends and opinions to help guide our final version.
We had to make sure the bird itself was recognizable as a parrot because that was important to the message of the app. The circle behind the parrot was a way of grounding the bird by giving it a bit of context, compared to it living in white space.
We explored more colors until we found our logo, one that struck the right balance between the graphic very geometric visual we were going for with the more soft organic nature of the bird
Typography
We chose Muli from Google Fonts as a base for our brand. When it came to thinking about the logo we wanted something with a bit more of a rounded edge to maybe make it feel a bit friendlier. We ended with Bahloo Bhai 2 from Google as well for the name of the word mark. Both of these typefaces also made their way into the UI of the app.
These new more punchy, tropical colors, paired with our logo, got our branding off to a start where we were able to apply it to our screens to explore the UI for our app.
Wireframes
We had two rounds of testing on our wireframes.
During our first round of testing on our low-fi wireframes, we were on campus and utilized studio common areas to get feedback from users that were similar to our personas. To test out our low fi wireframes we set a couple of tasks that would help us understand how a user would work through our app. This was an important step in solidifying the structure and flow of the application.
For our second round of testing we had established a lot more of our app, rethought some of the structure based on feedback from the first round of user testing. We wanted to see harder tasks be completed in this round of testing to really push the level of feedback we received. At this point in the semester we were all remote. These tests took place over Zoom to share screens and the XD clickable prototype. We started off asking them to complete two of the following tasks and then ended with asking about our branding, focusing on the logo options we have been working with.
Tasks
Onboarding - Sign up to create an account and enter preferences
Find an Event
This task was to see how users would find a concert. For instance, do they search for one or filter through to one?
This also gave us a chance to show the user event pages, to follow up on after the tasks.
Copying an Itinerary
This was more of a challenging feature. We wanted to see if it was intuitive for users to find a plan through accessing their friend’s page.
Adding an Update
We have created 4 different “Updates”. We had the users choose which one they wanted to explore.
We were having trouble with the language behind “Updates” as well and wanted feedback on it.
Final Questions
On any specific screen or in general, was there anything that you were expecting to see that you didn’t?
Was there something that you were not expecting to see?
Was there anything that confused you during this process?
Once we were happy with our logo and branding… we iterated through our wireframes to reflect it.
We added more screens and more details to finalize our high fidelity clickable prototype.
THE SOLUTION
Find events, plan activities with friends, communicate and figure out the details together, etc.
Filter through ongoing events and find plans made by friends all in the same place.
Create a new plan from scratch. Want to go to on a ski trip? Add your friends to the group and start planning.
Chat with friends and assign tasks to flesh out your plan. Find templates and get reminders, let us do the work.
Find a similar plan to edit yourself. Find where to stay, how to get there, and what to do.
Create It
Find It
Copy It
Plan It