Parti App Prototype

Mobile UI | End-To-End Design Process
Class Project - MEJO 581: UX Design and Usability @ UNC Chapel Hill

Iterated through the design-thinking process to address user pain-points with amateur event planning.

Project Overview

Over the course of a semester-long design thinking project, my team and I developed Parti, a conceptual mobile app designed to empower amateur event planners to organize gatherings with confidence and creativity. My team and I were tasked with identifying pain points with a given task, in which we chose event planning, and iterate through the design-thinking process in order to develop a prototype to address the identified pain points. We chose to focus on amateur event planning, in which users did not have formal tools to plan event suchs as family Thanksgiving dinner, club meetings, and after-work outings. The project followed the full design thinking process — from empathizing with users to prototyping and iterating on feedback — to create a tool that simplifies complex planning tasks while supporting collaboration and personalization.

We began by conducting user interviews to understand the common challenges and pain points faced by informal planners, such as planning transportation, coordinating with vendors, and tracking task completion and deadlines. These insights guided our design approach and helped us prioritize features that would be most valuable to users.

Through ideation and low-fidelity prototyping, we explored multiple interface concepts emphasizing usability and visual clarity. Usability testing sessions helped refine our design to feature customizable task lists, collaboration features, and event timeline visualization. The final high-fidelity prototype balanced aesthetics and functionality, providing a seamless experience for users at all planning stages. This project deepened my understanding of human-centered design, iterative prototyping, and user research synthesis. It also demonstrated the power of collaborative ideation in translating user insights into actionable design solutions that address real-world needs.

Role:

Interviewer, Usability Tester, Lead UI Designer

Team:

Cindy Xu
Mollie Mitchell
Ella Campbell
Anna Fetter

Timeframe:

Sept. 2024 - Dec. 2024

Our Problem Statement

Individuals planning events, such as family reunions or birthday parties, struggle with coordinating logistics, RSVPs, and activity schedules. How can we design a more intuitive event planning tool that simplifies the organization process for events that emphasizes the need for organized collaboration?

I: Develop a Research Plan

To develop our initial research plan, we needed to define our primary goal, identify key questions, and establish our target audience. We also laid out our research timeline, and ideated expected outcomes while identifying future steps after the research plan was completed.

Primary Goal

To understand specific challenges people face when planning gatherings of groups with six or more individuals.

What tools and methods do you currently use to manage and plan gathering logistics?
What are the main problems and frustrations in the gathering planning process?
What specific features do you wish existed in planning gatherings?

Target Audience

Methodology

Key Questions

Research Method: Remote survey / structured questionnaire

Number of Participants: 4-6

Interview Duration: 10-25 minutes

Tools: www.usertesting.com

Expected Outcomes

Age: 18-40 years old
Event Attendance: At least 3-5 times a year.
Event Planning: Email chains, group chats on messaging apps, Google Drive, word of mouth.

Timeline

Week 1 | September 24 - October 1

Finalize Research Plan and Interview Script
Make usertesting quiz, open for participants
Finalize Timeline of Deliverables in the Research Stage

Week 2 | October 2 - October 7

Go over interview scripts by Thursday, October 3rd
Analyze findings, pull out key pain points and present by Thursday October 7th

Insights into Current Practices: We will learn which technologies are our target event planners (socially active 18-40 year olds) use to plan their social gatherings of 6 or more. How do they usually go about planning events?

Pain Points: We will learn what the hardest point of planning events is for our users. We will likely hear about different types of events and the pain points for each. This will help us uncover overlap.

Feature Wishlist: Users will tell us the features they wished they had when planning events.

Refined problem statement: We will be able to focus our problem statement based on user feedback to narrow the scope of features that are necessary for us to build.

II: Analyze and Empathize

After completeing our interviews, we pulled out key details about our participants such as demographics, event planning needs, and event planning pain points. We seperated our findings into minor pain points, major pain points, and positive findings in order to familiarize ourselves with our participants’ feelings with event planning. After analyzing our findings, we concluded that there was a need for a centralized event planning tool to address our participants’ needs. Our findings led us to revise our original problem statement in order to best represent our participants feelings.

Minor Pain Points

Disorganized communication
Transportation issues
Task completion

Findings

Major Pain Points

Communication issues
Event management challenges
Logistics and planning

Conclusions

Positives Aspects

Helpful tools
Collaborative work environment

Communication efforts were not reciprocated
Trouble with vendor management (catering, rentals, transportation)
Issues delegating responsibilities

Revised Problem Statement

How can we create a more methodical event planning tool that enhances group communication and clarifies individual responsibilities, while promoting organized collaboration?

User Personas and Journey Maps

We then synthesized our findings to create three detailed user personas and journey maps in order to emaphize with and understand the users we were designing for.

III: Ideate with Lo-Fi Wireframes

Ideating with low-fidelity wireframes allowed us to rapidly brainstorm initial ideas and functions without getting bogged down by design details. It helped us focus on the core concepts we wanted to address in our design and quickly create creative design solutions to our user’s pain points. From these lo-fi wireframes, we as a group decided on which functions we found the most interesting to implement into our high-fidelity prototype.

IV: Prototype

It was time to design our first iteration of our high-fidelity partial prototype. This meant defining tasks for our potential users and designing for those specific tasks. Our team used Figma to create the wireframes, in which I took on the role of Lead UI Designer, creating a large majority of the wireframes using best design practices as well as establishing a theme and checking for cohesiveness of the wireframes.

Task 2: Sending Invites

Task 3: Events Dashboard

Task 1: Creating an event

V: Conduct Usability Tests

Once our initial prototype wireframes were complete, we conducted a moderated usability test with users in our target group, following a think-aloud protocol while observing our users complete our task flows. This included drafting an interview script where we defined our research goals for our testing. Once the usability tests were complete, we followed up with open-ended interview questions regarding our users’ experience with our prototype. Through this, we were able to identify our users’ likes and dislikes with our initial prototype to guide our redesign process.

Research Goals

Assess Ease of Use
Test Task Completion
Evaluate User Satisfaction
Uncover Navigation and Information Architecture Issues
Identify Accessibility Issues
Validate Design Consistency
Gather Insights for Future Design

Participants

P1: Graduate Student, 23 y.o.
P2: Undergraduate Student, 21 y.o.
P3: Stay-At-Home Mom, 48 y.o.
P4: Undergraduate Student, 19 y.o.

VI: Evaluate and Revise

Based on our user testing, we identified key problems and well as positive feedback with our initial prototype. From these problems, we seperated them into major and minor problems based on the frequency an issue was brought up as well as whether or not the issues that arose directly affected the usability of our interface and impeded user function.