Free City

How can GTA residents easily access affordable cultural activities?

This is an in-class group project conducted within three months. My primary contributions include:

  • Designed a high-fi prototype that balanced technical constraints and users’ needs

  • Led user testing, gathered user feedback through unmoderated, in-person testing sessions, and integrated insights to enhance prototypes

  • Created major task flows that address user pain points

  • Conducted user research, including 43 user surveys and 3 user interviews, analyzed results, and consolidated major user pain points

Sector

Cultural and entertainment

Team

Xinyan Fu, Mengtong Li, Dan Xu, Nadia Smith

Design Tools

Figma, Photoshop, Procreate, Datawrapper

Timeline

September 2023 to December 2023

Problems

Ontarians value cultural experiences. However, challenges such as the rising cost of living are preventing many from participating in a full range of cultural activities. Research indicates a need for more affordable and accessible cultural experiences.

User Research

To identify specific user pain points, my team designed a survey with 43 responses and conducted 10 interviews to learn about people's experiences participating in cultural activities in Toronto.

WHAT DID WE LEARN?

Dependency on Social Media

Affordability

Information Overload

Importance of Engagement

Torontonians are struggling to fully enjoy the city's cultural activities due to the absence of a centralized place for affordable cultural events. The current system forces people to rely on social media or word of mouth, leading to an overwhelming and often ineffective search process. Many are unaware of available discounts or free events in the city.

Torontonians need an info hub that to help them locate free or discounted events and socialize with those who share a similar interest.

Meet Christine

Currently, for a typical Toronto resident like Christine, finding an event involves several steps: browsing through social media, picking up physical flyers, or hearing about it from friends and family.

However, that’s often not enough. Christine frequently has to visit another platform, whether it's social media or a different website, to find the exact date and location of an event. Even then, she might decide not to go because it's either too expensive or the timing doesn't work for her.

Christine wants to experience the city’s rich cultural offerings, but the complicated process leaves her stranded.

Design Ideation

How can we help? Our goal is to help Christine find events tailored to her interests without breaking the bank. We also want to build a community for people like Christine, enabling them to exchange event information, find interest buddies, and attend events together.

These ideas grew through our discussions. While we were ambitious, we were also aware of the limitations of this project. Eventually, we decided to focus on three main ideas that would help build a structure for the project.

Now, Christine can:

  • Access details of cultural events all in one place;

  • Discover cultural events that are specific to her interests;

  • Find free or discounted events so she can attend them more often.

User Flow

To make the process more seamless, we plan to start by designing the onboarding process, and then map out Christine’s journey to find an event.

With our solution, Christine can see all free or affordable events near her after creating an account and specifying her interests. The onboarding process is designed to cover most event types and gather the necessary details for the system to make accurate recommendations.

Once Christine finds an event she likes, she can view the details with a simple tap, save it, buy tickets, or share it with friends. When it's time for the event, she can access the location and even the event ticket through her profile on the platform. Additionally, Christine can set up a budget to help track her spending.

Just like that, Christine can effortlessly explore and enjoy the city's rich cultural offerings without the hassle or the expense. Below are two main task flows Christine would go through.

Lean Evaluation

My team took this sketch to 3 potential users like Christine and learned some areas of improvement. Specifically, they want:

  • more event categories;

  • selecting multiple answers at the same time;

  • edit their preference afterwards;

  • more options for location sharing.

Additionally, we found that the platform could benefit from a navigation bar to help users transition between pages. 

PROPOSED SOLUTION

  1. Introduce a consistent global navigation system

  2. Enhance the comprehensiveness of onboarding by including diverse event categories and engaging UX writing

  3. Create a page for users to edit their personalized feed

  4. Revamp the location selection to provide more options

Clickable Prototype

With that, I designed the latest clickable prototype which allows users to complete three tasks:

1. Onboarding

Users choose their preferred cultural event types, specify their locations, and indicate their ideal price range.

2. Bookmark events

The For You Page generates a list of personalized recommendations for users, while the Explore Page presents all cultural events available in the city. Users can choose to see event details and bookmark them. All bookmarks are saved under the Favorites Page.

3. Edit preference

Users can change their preferences on the Profile Page, which can be found through the navigation bar.

(Clickable prototype to the right, and also available in Figma)

Usability Testing

To see how well we did, I showed this to another three representative users and observed their interaction, followed by an interview after each session.

Task Completion

Overall Satisfaction

Although all three had a high task completion rate, they were still not quite happy with what we came up with. Specifically, their interactions prompt further improvement with icons, personalization, and navigation, asking for more intuitive design and fun elements.

We also learned that most users liked the design and were excited about the onboarding process because it is what they “care about the most.”

Based on the feedback, here’s how I plan to fix the problems in the next iteration:

  1. Create different styles for the For You Page and the Explore Page

  2. Improve UX writing to further engage users

  3. Clarify some icons and language used for features (replace “Favorite” with “Bookmarks” to avoid confusion)

  4. Continue developing the event rating and online community features

Lessons Learned

  1. As my first UX project, I learned the fundamental principles and gained familiarity with the design process. Specifically, I developed skills in organizing and strategizing tasks for prototyping and usability testing as a team lead.

  2. Always focus on the user’s needs. Throughout our process, I constantly revisited user pain points and need statements to ensure that our design efforts remained aligned with the actual needs of our users. This step proved not only helpful but also essential in guiding our project to success.

  3. Users would rather have more options than less. The desire for “more” became a recurring theme throughout user testing. This experience taught me that, in user-centric design, the emphasis should be on providing users with more possibilities and allowing them to decide how they want to engage with the platform.

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