Paris & Co is the innovation and economic development agency of the Paris metropolitan area supported by the city. It accelerate the development of French and international startups.
The agency supports more than 400 startups divided in 12 areas (tourism, food, sport…) and is present in 15 innovative platforms in Paris.
This project was conducted in 2 weeks with the support of 3 members of the transversal team of Paris & Co , heads of startup development.
The brief
Currently, Startups receive once a week a newsletter with the next events form Transversal team (Workshops, Office hours with experts, Academies…) for the following days. Then, Paris & Co uses the Eventbrite platform to let people subscribe. It’s important to know that all the different sectors of Paris & Co (sport, food, tourism….) has their own way to promote their events, so the Startups receive and important amount of information.
Thus, the brief was to create an Event platform within the new intranet of Paris & Co, from scratch. It would let incubated Startups having access at the entire panel of events at a glance and be able to subscribe or unsubscribe directly. This project would be an MVP to the new platform of Paris&Co.
UX Part
With the team, to better understand the user flow during registration, we did the User Journey Map As-is of the user (the actual journey) to better understand the pain points (in red on the graph below).
Interviews
We conducted 6 interviews from startups incubated from 3 months to 3 years into P&Co to better understand their point of view and pain points regarding this journey.
I ask them questions regarding their actual path in order to attend to an event, the “informative” phase (how to be alerted by new events..), the “during” phase subscription and all the “after” (regarding the waiting list, the alert, the reminders…). Here are the most powerful insights:
“It’s annoying to have to fill in your personal information every time”
“There is too many different contact points from all incubators”
“I would like to have a place that centralizes all the supports”
“I never found how to unsuscribe… so I never did!”
“I would like to put events on my favorites to find them again”
We took theses into consideration and we created a persona: Jules, a young auto-entrepreneur who has frustrations and needs through its event subscription path:
Theses took us to think about the following problem statement which was the redline for the next :
“Jules needs a way to choose the events that meet his current needs and to be able to register easily in order to respond to his startup issues quickly and gain new skills.”
Ideation
We did an ideation session with the team: a Crazy 8 (you have 8 minutes to draw 8 ideas responding to the problem statement: the craziest possible, no need to be doable). With 24 different ideas of feature, we proceed to a dot voting and place the winning ideas into a chart by feasibility and importance of the feature.
Here are all the ideas we had and with a red dot, those we kept for the MVP sorted by steps of the registration to an event. We thought keeping the others for an other version of the event platform but for the MVP, we didn’t think it was essential:
UI Part
We now have an idea on our mind of what we wanted the platform will looks like, so I begin directly with doing my mid-fi, without low-fi to not spend too much time on it. I prefer iterate on mid-fi at this point.
Mid-fidelity wireframe
From these mid-fi, I conducted 4 usability tests and get powerful insights from users:
On the homepage:
- put “past events” on “my inscriptions” and not on a separate tab
- put “ selection for you” in first position because it’s what the user want to see primary
On the event page:
- The button at the top to register is useless, it’s a double info because there is already a banner to subscribe, just need to fix the banner to have the button everytime on the page
- “add on favorite” to remove, the heart is enough understandable
On subscription page:
- Replace the boxes by checkboxes because it is not clear at all
- Preselected the condition box if user choose that on personal preferences
On my subscription page:
- Add an option “add to my calendar” if I forgot to add it on my calendar during the subscription
Here is the results of few of feedbacks below, (changes in red):
High-fidelity iterations
From mid-fi, I began the high fidelity wireframes and iterate thanks to 4 more usability tests (1 was the same user and 3 others were new to have a complete new point of view).
Biggest changes were from the card styles:
- for event cards: from outlines to no outlines but with a smooth shadow
- for inscriptions cards: I changed them with a ticket shape. We also added a calendar icon who show if it’s already on your calendar or not.
- on past events, we added the rate to remember wat was the quality of the presentation.
Style tile
Our style tile show all the graphical and colors element in just one page. It reflect the design of the solution
- The police of the company: Averta with different size for each type of text and for desktop or mobile.
- The icons are all created from scratch, almost all outlines and empty.
- Each button shape and color has a specific signification
- We took the colors of the company: the primary and secondary from the website and 9 other for each thematic of events.
From mobile to desktop: responsiveness
This platform is not an app, it’s a website where startups will log on it from their smartphone mostly but also at work on their desktop. We wanted to adapt screens of mobile (mobile first) to a computer screens with the same functionalities but more space.
The aim is that the user can see at a glance, without scrolling, the important informations he needs: on the homepage, there is a banner of its next event or if an event is ongoing; on the event page you have a “subscribe” button as a call to action.
Solution
Check our mobile solution on the prototype below and see all the features developed.
Next steps
This is an MVP, and for sure, there is some improvement and new features to add thanks to usability tests and interviews, we took into account some feedbacks and kept some for the V2:
- Adding the duration of event on cards
- Having the possibility to share with someone
- Be able to add an option to choose its own reminder (1 hour before…)
- See the degree of filling of the event
- Add a filter of only available events (not full)
- Have a video icon on past event if there is replay of the event
- …
Thank you for reading, and thank you again to all the team of Paris & Co. I hope this article has been useful, fo not hesitate to give me some feedbacks!
