While designing the final iterations of the app, I reviewed peer feedback and best practices for how to improve what I had come up with. Some of the feedback I had received looked at how to best organize the content on the home screen – the main hub for most users. After asking peers what they might be looking for if they wanted to go out, I realized that most people did not plan their nights farther than a day in advance. Therefore, when someone is looking to plan their evening, they want to see what is happening that night. People are extremely busy and are more prone to follow through on buying tickets to a nightlife event by discovering an interesting find from the start. Designer Cameron Chapman describes this priority, saying: “When a person visits a website or app on a mobile device, they want to complete the task at hand as quickly as possible”. To help users find venues and events quicker, I added buttons to separate and organize collections by either events or venues. As the main focus of the app, the quality of collections is vital to helping users find relevant information and is an important tool to keep people engaged.
Similarly, to how Instagram keeps users engaged by producing an endless cycle of content to scroll through, I came up with a similar venues/events section appearing on pages that would otherwise be a dead-end to keep people scrolling through. If someone is continuing to look through each page, they are probably motivated to buy a ticket and the more I can do to help them, the better.
As a part of revising my early drafts, I focused on simplifying every page to its core functions to keep the experience as seamless as possible. People don’t need information that isn’t vital to their search process and it can really hurt the effectiveness of the app as a whole by increasing the cognitive load. Nick Babich describes cognitive load saying, “The less friction and confusion users have when interacting with an app (e.g. the cognitive load), the better the chance that app stays around”. To simply pages with venue or event information, I made each tile larger from the last iteration to bring attention to the images and remove clutter that could obstruct a user’s attention.
Finally, I settled on a visual direction for the app. The existing app’s visual design used a dark UI with a logo that looked like it was for an iPhone app from 2010. Interestingly, many of the competing apps’ logos used similarly dark tones for their logos which I think is meant to insinuate a connection to nightlife. Tablelist uses an ugly purple in select areas of the app, which is a step in the right direction, however, I think that it lacks consistency and isn’t used throughout user touchpoints. This makes it feel like an afterthought and the color is not really associated with their brand as a result. The visual theme I designed introduces a gradient of dark navy and bright splashes of purple to symbolize bright stage lights in a nightclub and provides a clearer connection to the app’s functions and brand. My next step is to design a new logo for the app to help it stand out and better communicate what users can expect from the company.
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