Minema is a small, discussion-oriented events company based in California. It's founders, Nate Kanefield and Lorraine Ma, are both Stanford Business School students and created the business to encourage and aid people in connecting on a deeper level with their peers through engaging content and discussions.
As a growing business in its infancy, Minema was seeking a renewed digital experience in order to clearly express the value of their service and increase site visitor conversion. The business operates on a subscription model, which emphasizes the need to convey value and direct customers toward membership with as little friction as possible.
In our first meeting, the team and I attempted to narrow down exactly what type of experience Minema aimed to provide. Due to the time constraints of this project, it was important that we kept a narrow focus on something realistic, attainable, and most importantly impactful to the business.
We thus determined to focus on creating a mobile-web oriented landing/marketing page and event discovery user flow, based on the fact that most potential customers would first come in contact with the brand through this medium.
The ultimate goal of the project would be to evaluate the site visitor’s perceived value from the experience and likelihood of subscribing.
With a broad project scope, comes a broad design role. I acted as a researcher, interaction designer, visual designer, product validation tester, and ultimately the project lead.
In the end, user experience design is not only about creating a product but also about communicating ideas, defending design decisions, and ensuring that the user is kept at the center of the process, resulting in an outcome that truly meets the needs of the users, and by way of that, meets the needs of the stakeholders.
The first thing that I wanted to understand is what motivates people to go to events. I took to the internet for some research and discovered a keynote speaker and renowned event planner, Julius Solaris. Julius outlines several deep inner drives for people to attend events. Of these insights, a few of them stood out to me.
I go to an event because:
I thus recognized the importance for our product to clearly outline topics and available content, provide multiple engagement/skill levels when applicable, outline amenities/perks, and offer users unique venue options with the appropriate UI tools to bring them into the spaces.
Based on my initial discussions with the Minema team, they ultimately sought to increase subscription rates. In their business model, it was essential that they convert users to monthly subscribers in order to continue operating and thus, this was of paramount importance.
I expressed my belief that the best way to convert customers would be to show them the value that the service adds to their lives. I asked, “what is the goal of the service?”, and received the response, “to get users to subscribe”. This line of dialogue continued for a while before we eventually arrived at the actual purpose of their service, “to enhance human connection through creative content and discussion”.
I thus found it prudent to do some research on persuasion in order to design a product that employed psychology to enhance customer conversion.
I discovered the following techniques:
Social Proof
Robert Cialdini, in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, states: “If you can get people who are similar to the person you’re trying to persuade to speak on your behalf, it’s a lot easier for you than if you have to try to hammer your message into a reticent mind”.
It is thus important that we show any available social metrics to validate the user's decision to subscribe and give them a clear indication of the value that their friends, or similar people, have gotten from membership.
Memory
The Zeigarnik Effect, a phenomenon authored by Lum Zeigarnik, details that people feel an urge to complete a task that they have started. “By asking for a small commitment (clicking on a link or a button), you can leverage this memory trigger and get many more people to say “yes” to your larger commitment”.
Based on this, the use of a 2-step opt-in could potentially increase the number of converted site visitors.
Anticipation
Gretchen Rubin, in her book, The Happiness Project, expresses that “By having something to look forward to… you bring happiness into your life well before the event actually takes place”.
By building a sense of excitement and anticipation for attending events and becoming a member, we can increase the happiness users feel and encourage them to join.
Laziness
In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains that “if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In short, “laziness is built deep into our nature”.
Thus it is very important that we tell the users exactly what to do and lead them through the tasks with clear explanations and visual cues.
Before jumping into my primary user research, I wanted to get an idea for the current expectations of our target users in similar experiences. Developing a foundation of mental models would enhance our usability and identify any shortcomings of competitors.
I was provided with a list of competitors to investigate and took to the app store to explore the current market.
Classpass is a very popular exercise class and studio subscription service. It's class discovery functionality aligns very closely with the goals of Minema. They employ a very clear call to action (to download their app), an easy to understand walk through of steps, and a very fun and easy to use search functionality. They also use a search by map feature, which would be very useful for our purposes.
The Nudge is a small event promotion company. Their interface revolves around a clear product offering, selecting a home city, and an easy referral system.
SoFar Sounds is an event company that specializes in music performances. They allow users to search by city (similar to The Nudge) and display a series of visual instructions similar to Classpass.
The resurfacing of these features shows how essential they are to this type of application.
Eventbrite is a large event access and ticketing company. While their platform is very popular, their search functionality seemed to have some mobile optimization issues, which should be avoided in our product.
Fathom Events employs a category based search flow similar to the functionality we aim to include. However, their text-based menu requires several clicks and is difficult to navigate despite the use of breadcrumbs at the top of the screen. Another example of something to avoid in our design.
With a strong understanding of the current marketplace and what users might expect from our product, it was time to dive into our own research.
The team at Minema provided me with several sets of notes from interviews that they had done with past and potential users.
Upon review, it was apparent that the interview notes suffered from a lack of consistent questions and diverse participants. All of the interview participants were of a similar age, demographic, and shared interests (turns out they were all Stanford University classmates of Nate and Lorraine). They were also all prompted with different questions, which made it difficult to find clear patterns in their responses. Despite this, we agreed that my time was best spent designing, rather than gathering additional user research, and thus I focussed on analyzing the information available.
I created an affinity map of the interview notes in order to identify any patterns that existed. As it turns out, a few very clear groups formed.
*Group 7 seemed to be a subgroup of group 6
Based on these affinity groups, I formed the following questions to orient my design process:
With these “how might we” questions in mind, I wanted to develop a better idea of the actual tasks users might aim to accomplish on the site in order to narrow down exactly what features should be available in our minimum viable product.
I thus created a set of user stories, which outline “epics” based on each HMW question and a series of specific user stories for each epic. The stories identify a user type, task to be completed, and motivation for completing the task.
I assigned values for each story's priority, value to the user, and workload estimate in order to easily determine which features to focus on. User stories tagged with “MVP” would be included in my design, those labeled “1.0” or “2.0” may add additional value in the future, but are not essential to meet the immediate needs of our target users.
When presenting this spreadsheet to the team at Minima, I also label the stories by the user flow they would be a part of, which are outlined in the next section.
With our users' primary needs identified, I outlined 3 key user flows to focus on designing. When tasked with designing an entire digital experience, especially on a limited schedule, it is important to narrow the design focus on the most essential user flows to remain targeted and direct with respect to the user's needs.
With these “red-route” user flows approved by the team, it was time to put pencil to paper.
I began by sketching out the general layout of the site - for which I imagined a fixed header with the logo, an events button, and a menu. The landing page features a clear tagline and call-to-action and would scroll down to instructions, “search by” content, and a partner with us section.
The event discovery flow was modeled after the Classpass studio discovery flow and features a search bar, map/list functionality, filtering, and a list of results. My goal was to provide frictionless access to relevant content, stemming from affinity group #4 (determining what to consume).
Once I had completed my paper sketches, I used Sketch to mock up the wireframes. Rather than the standard black and white, I used a shade of blue from the Minema logo, simply because it was more fun to work with and gave some additional flavor to the wireframes.
With some extra time before my next meeting with the team, I ended up working the screens into a medium-fidelity state. I enjoyed working with the visual aspect and had fun adding some images and colors to the wireframes.
I quickly learned that wireframes are low-fidelity for a reason.
Adding images and colors can mislead stakeholders and direct their attention to small details in the design too early in the process. In this case, Nate was distracted by the use of blue and found the visual design too repetitive. The feedback was incorporated in the next phase of the design, however, I am curious how he would have responded if the wireframes were truly low-fidelity.
I also imagined how some of the interactions would play out:
The first feedback received from the Minima team was that:
the use of 2 call-to-actions on the landing page was confusing.
The idea behind this design was to provide a clear link to the events (which Minema commenting the would prefer to say “experiences”) page, but also emphasize the fact that you could become a member. On their current site, Minema uses the call-to-action “subscribe now”. I advised that saying “Become A Member” would create a sense of curiosity in the user and make them aware of this format without being too “salesy”.
Additionally, the use of color on the buttons provides a clear hierarchy, adding further emphasis to the membership capabilities.
After some discussion with them and some of my peers,
we agreed that showing two different CTAs was confusing, as it forced the user to make a choice, which contradicted our goal of walking the user through the experience effortlessly.
I decided to leave “browse experiences” as the primary call-to-action, but include“Become A Member” under the instructions, as it would give the user additional context to this action.
The second piece of feedback was that:
the event discovery page seemed visually repetitive.
This may have resulted from too high fidelity being used in my wireframes. With detailed text and color, but no images, the panels seem unbalanced.
Regardless, I decided that this screen would be more visually pleasing if I made the panels larger and emphasized the event images. This would draw the user into each event listing at the expense of being able to scroll through listings very quickly, which did not seem necessary based on the number of offerings per month (around 7).
Lastly, the team mentioned that
they were interested in some sort of calendar function that would allow users to sort content by date.
This feature was added as part of the filtering options. This was a good case of: “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!”.
In the process of iterating on my designs, I also made a few other updates:
Flow 1: Landing page, understanding the service and value, call to action (browse events)
Flow 2: Selecting a city, searching for events in the area
Flow 3: Learning about a specific event, sharing the event page
Using Figma, per request of the Minema team, I created a prototype of the three user flows in order to test the usability and value of the solution we created.
While typically at this point I would choose to test the usability of the interface and iterate on the designs, I proposed to the team that we go a different direction. As a pre-market product in its infancy,
I believed the company would benefit more from proof of concept and value validation, in order to ensure that the digital experience worked as intended.
They agreed, and I thus planned and executed a small qualitative study.
I worked with Minema to devise two primary objectives for our study:
Evaluate the landing page. What do users feel when they view it? What do they want to click? Do they understand the purpose and value of Minema? Would they become a member?
Evaluate the event detail page and typical user’s event preferences. What do people care about in regard to events? What do users gravitate toward on the page?
30-minute remote video interviews were conducted with 5 target participants. Participants were recruited via email from my natural network, located in Boston and New York, based on the following qualifications:
21-35 years old
Owns a smartphone and uses mobile web applications daily
Regularly attends public events (at least once a month)
Subjects were prompted to perform our 3 users flows and asked a series of questions about their experience.
Users don’t understand what makes Minema unique until later in the user journey.
When prompted to describe what they thought the purpose of Minema was, most of the test subjects said “a film based event company”. When asked the elaborate, it became clear that the title of the company being so close to “cinema” and a hero image of a cinema (it actually has the word “cinema” in it) portrayed a film-oriented brand.
Furthermore, the discussion element of the service did not seem apparent to users. They all latched onto “event company”, but did not clearly understand the true brand identity until the event detail page, which outlines the discussion element of the experience.
Update: make Minema’s discussion-based brand identity clearer in the hero image and headline. Emphasize the unique value that discussion-based events provide.
The landing page has too many different paths, users would prefer a simpler experience.
Almost all of the test subjects claimed they would click “explore experiences” and that the additional search options were redundant. I felt these additional sections provided more visual appeal as the user scrolled down, however it was apparent in the tests that these added no additional value.
Additionally, users all claimed that the “partner with us” section seemed irrelevant. Some said that this should be on a separate page and that people seeking to partner would likely explore the menu.
All of this feedback aligned with the way Minema felt, which made for an easy design decision!
Update: the landing page should be simplified by removing the “search by” sections and replacing the partners sections with a button in the footer.
Filtering events is very easy and usable.
All five test subjects commented that the search and filtering options made sense and were easy to use. Interestingly enough, they all began by filtering by category before using either the calendar or map functions to sort by date or location.
Update: none needed!
Users want to know the event format on the search panels (25-minute podcast, 25-minute discussion).
The search result panels did not include any information about the context of the event. Testers commented that the event and venue names do not provide much information on the format of the event or what it is about. Detail about the event type is key in deciding whether to further explore it and also provides a good opportunity to emphasize discussion in the brand identity.
Update: Add the event format to the panels in the search flow.
The event detail page could benefit from some adjustments.
Every test subject asked, “how much does it cost?” when looking at the event detail page. The team and I had decided that the price would be shown after clicking “Get Tickets”. They claimed that this is a major factor in their decision to attend and almost seems “sketchy” that it takes so many clicks to uncover the price.
⅖ users mentioned that the rating system seemed irrelevant. While something like this makes sense for comparing workout classes on Classpass, it’s more difficult to compare different mediums like a film and a podcast. “How does a 4-star film compare to a 3-star podcast?”.
One tester, an event planner, mentioned that the discussion points are actually a potential turn off to event-goers. Users who may be interested in the event’s topic may avoid going based on the specific prompts. “If one of the discussion prompts made me uncomfortable, I probably wouldn’t go even if I was interested in the event”.
Lastly, the sharing menu I designed was not necessary. All testers claimed they would expect the share button to open the sharing options in their device OS, thus the current mental model does not require this additional menu.
Update: The event detail page should show the price (per Minema, the number of credits). I had the idea as well to add the Minema “M” logo next to the price (similar to the way Amazon used the prime logo next to eligible items). I figured this would draw a connection to the member and give context to the “credits” system.
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Ratings can be removed.
The discussion section should be vaguer, outlining the general topic of discussion but not identifying any specific prompts.
The sharing menu can be removed.
Based on the results from my testing sessions and the updates made to the designs, I believe we have created a product that clearly expresses the brand identity, purpose, and unique value provided by Minema. We designed an event discovery flow that provides quick access to content that is relevant to the user. Event detail is easy to understand and visually appealing, drawing users into the experience.
Minema expressed the ultimate goal of the project was to increase the conversion rate of site visitors to subscribers and I am confident that by designing with the user at the center of the process, we created a product that will accomplish this task.
With the primary user flows of the experience designed and tested, the next step is to create the remainder of the experience. Once implemented, the site should be tested for conversion rates against the current design in order to further validate the use of this solution.
Additional user research should also be done. The research used in this program was limited to a small group and did not provide sufficient data to design for all intended users.
I have learned more from this project than any other in my experience. Not just about user-centered design, but about working with real people who care very much about the outcome. At first, it was intimidating to defend my design decisions, but I quickly learned the importance of thoughtfully communicating my process and reasoning.
It can be difficult to look a stakeholder in the eye and defend an opinion that they disagree with, but effectively translating the complex code of user-oriented design is crucial to keeping the user at the center of the puzzle and creating a successful solution.
Altogether it was an amazing experience. I am truly grateful to the team at Minema for bringing me on and challenging me with this adventure.
10 Secret Reasons Why We Attend Events
Julius Solaris, 2019
How to Persuade People to Subscribe: 7 Psychological Triggers
Mary Fernandez, 2019
