I am a huge fan of music festivals and crafting one of a kind creative costumes is one of my specialties, so I was excited to work on a mobile app for Voodoo Music + Arts Experience. My team was tasked with a complete redesign of the festival’s mobile app to help elevate the festival-goers experience. Read on to learn about our process.
The Voodoo Experience app is a mobile app that allows festival-goers to do everything they would expect to do with a festival app such as view lineups and check festival information, along with other features that make the entire experience easier to navigate. Users can access an interactive map, easily locate their friends and create a custom schedule so they don’t miss a beat.
Most large festivals have a mobile app, but we wanted to create something that not only checks all the boxes of what is expected but also adds features to address the painful points during the festival journey. We wanted to be sure we weren't just hitting all the high notes, but also addressing the low notes, as there are definitely times when a large event can be frustrating.
View PrototypeTo begin, we started with competitive analysis in order to understand what common features can be found in existing festival mobile apps. Reviewing mobile apps for large scale festivals we came up with a baseline of what features we might want to include in the app. We also knew that a map was a key component so we did some comparative analysis with other map applications.
As a team we brainstormed together to come up with questions that would help us understand the festival goers experience and identify pain points where the app could help. We conducted 12 user interviews with people that regularly attend Voodoo or similar festivals.
After our interviews were completed, we performed an affinity mapping exercise as a team.
After synthesizing our data we created a journey map and 3 unique personas: The Influencer, The SuperFan, and The Spectator.
With our personas and journey map in mind we were then able to identify 3 problems the app could help with.
Before jumping into the design our next steps included: creating an app map, defining user flows and determining what must and should be on the app screens.
Each team member rapidly sketched out their ideas for each screen which we presented and discussed together. This helped generate a multitude of ideas for how to approach the design. Here are some of my sketches.
Given time constraints we decided to test with the mid-fidelity prototype. We observed 3 users complete 3 task flows.
After our user interviews we were able to go back and make iterations to the prototype while bringing up the fidelity I created mood boards to help inspire the design as well. We decided to keep it clean and visually streamlined since festival-goers might be a bit, well, 'over stimulated' after a long day of partying when trying to use the app to locate friends or ride sharing.
Finally, the moment you have been scrolling for! Check out our interactive prototype designed in Figma.
The prototype is just the beginning and theres still a lot to be done before 2022. I was impressed with what my team was able to accomplish in 3 weeks time. Next steps for the app include: