Redesigning UI to help attract new target audiences
UX & Content Strategy
Client: Virtual Reality Toronto (VRTO)
10 weeks
Project Duration
User research, content design, user experience design
Services
Jonathan prias, Bernardo Lizarraga, Gwyneth Samson, Lok Wun Shing
Team members
Adobe XD, InDesign
Tools used
Description
VRTO is an industry insider event that focuses on all things virtual reality and has a futuristic vision with regards to VR. As first semester students in the Interactive Media Management program, we simultaneously learned and used our classroom-learnings to help VRTO redesign their website for the upcoming conference. We worked as consultants to help VRTO refocus their strategy and redesign features to attract new target audience to the conference. Due to the pandemic, the conference had run virtually for two years and for 2022, they were transitioning to a hybrid version and wanted to attract as many attendees as possible.
Problem Statement
How might we persuade users to buy tickets for the 2022 event?
The Process
Empathize
The process of the redesign began with understanding the target audience that the event attracted each year. We spoke extensively with the founder of VRTO, Keram Malicki-Sanchez to understand not only past attendees but the potential customers for VRTO. Apart from attendees, the website is used by various stakeholders - speakers, media, sponsors . We worked with the project sponsor to identify customers and built customer journeys to establish user needs.
We conducted a Google survey to interview various stakeholders and identify their needs. Based on these inputs, we built personas for each stakeholder and used the insights to direct our strategy.
Ideate
Before we could move ahead and start designing, we conducted a current state analysis and content audit to see what was doing well, what needed changes, what could be included and excluded in the redesign. We also conducted a competitor analysis with major VR and game conferences to see how we could give VRTO the edge above the others.
Define
With the user needs defined and identification of what needed to be changed to achieve the objective, we defined steps and features for the redesign:
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Consistency in content, voice and tone
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A new content structure for the 'Event Schedule'
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Adding an in-website ticketing feature
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Change in navigational structure to help users find tickets and event schedule quickly and easily
Prototype
Using Adobe XD, we created a lo-fi wireframe and turned it into a high-fidelity prototype filled with microcontent to exhibit how the could be redesigned for the upcoming edition. Due to limitations of time, we could only work on one iteration. We were able to create all the features we set out in the defintion stage and client was happy to receive all the feedback.
Conclusion
This was my first UX project ever. From heuristics to strategy, the learning curve was immense as I was learning design principles in class one week and implementing them in this project the next week. The client received valuable and actionable feedback which was implemented when they redesigned the website for the 2022 event.