Introducing Events Page on the Baobab Platform
The Challenge
Baobab is a social, professional, learning community for nearly 25,000 users who are young African leaders, participants, and alumni of Mastercard Foundation programs. With the growing user need for virtual events following the coronavirus pandemic, the management accepted the proposal to introduce a new feature that allows for easy creation, registration, and advertisement for upcoming events. I accepted the challenge to introduce a seamless event creation and registration process as part of the ongoing redesign of the Baobab platform, working alongside the director, two developers, the project manager, and the content lead for the Baobab platform.
Role
UX Design Lead
Tools
Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator
Project Link
Baobabplatform.org
Approach
Discover
In the discovery phase, I conducted virtual user interviews to understand how users currently find events they are interested in on the platform. The interviews allowed me to listen, and watch users demonstrate how they currently navigate their way on the Baobab, their frustrations, and importantly, to understand some of the underlying digital experiences from other platforms that may inform their expectations for the new events’ features. The outcome of the discovery phase culminated in the creation of personas detailing the most pressing challenges and profiles of the user in the next stage of the design process.
Define
User Personas
The personas provided the means to share the outcome of the discovery phase with the funding stakeholders. The quotes were included to ensure the voices of the target users were present in those stakeholder meetings, whiles their goals allowed us to collaboratively brainstorm acceptance criteria for the events page.
User Stories
Tony needs a page where he could find all events, filter based on his priority, and easily search by keyword or find by country.
Nadine needs a feature that enables her to easily create, edit, and share her events with the alumni, whiles also gathering engagement metrics.
Comparative Analysis
Given that the expectations of our target audiences would be informed by their previous digital experiences, I performed additional secondary research by comparing the event creation and registration processes of platforms that emerged in the personas to create a guiding inspiration for my design process. See the inspiration column in the table below.
User task flow
Designs
Low fidelity iterations
My design goal is to ensure an effective merger of the stakeholder’s need for an easy advertisement with the audience and the users’ need for easy creation and discovery of events. The important features of the new events page include an advertisement billboard banner, a filter, event creation, and event management tools.
High fidelity iterations
The banner allows stakeholders to easily advertise important events on the Boabab platform at the top of all event posts, which increases the findability of a featured event, thereby increasing the chances of user registration and participation. This feature will particularly help the Baobab team to advertise its annual Scholar Summits.
I also designed a 4-step event creation process that promotes easy navigation and clear instructions to empower more users to become active creators and hosts for events in order to drive user engagement on the Baobab platform, which is an important business objective for this project.
A modal design is employed in the event creation process to grab and maintain the user’s attention during the four-step event creation process while also maintaining the colorful background of the event landing page. Sample mockups for the event process are shown in the slides below.
I also introduced a new dashboard that helps important stakeholders and partners on the Baobab platform to keep track of and gather performance data on their events. This helps them to accurately understand their target users' interest in their programs and content.
As opposed to providing users' email and phone numbers to event creators, this approach of giving engagement data, such as the number of likes and registrations, gives insight to creators while also ensuring the platform is able to comply with GDPR regulations on user privacy.
Mobile Displays
The site traffic on the Baobab platform shows high access from mobile devices. For this reason, I designed additional mobile screens to support the development process. The mockups below show some sample screens from the mobile designs demonstrating the events homepage, filters, event creation, and event management dashboard for creators.
In a post-event design evaluation research, the participants rated the design of the event page at 9/10 with positive feedback on the navigation and increased excitement on the introduction of the new features.
Reflections
This project marked my first experience taking an idea into a functional product. It is currently in development under the guidance of the program manager, the Baobab Project Manager. The most challenging part of the design process involved negotiating with funding stakeholders to determine the most relevant features and functionalities for users.
To address the needs of both stakeholders, I created a dashboard that grants access to non-GDPR compromising data—such as likes, comments, and registrations—while safeguarding users' personal information. Both parties happily accepted my design solution, leading to an exciting and valuable learning experience. I discovered the significance of thoroughly investigating stakeholders' motivations and minimizing my bias in the design process.