Redesigning how festival-goers find, compare, and organize their music festival experience

In the fall of 2014 I enrolled in General Assembly Boston's twelve-week course in User Experience to further my education in designing UX. In the span of the course we each conceived, researched, tested and finally presented a fully conceptualized project of our choice. My project, called Festivalize, is a single platform from which you can find, compare, organize and plan your music festival experience. 

Problem: There isn't any single search engine you can use to find, compare, organize and plan for attending a music festival.

Theory: More people would go to music festivals if they had a source that could assist with the planning and decision-making process of choosing a music festival to attend.

Problem statement: Reuben is an active, outgoing music enthusiast. He wants to go to a music festival this summer, and he needs to do research in order to make his decision. This makes him feel overwhelmed because there are so many different sources of information, all of which are scattered and spread out over different websites. Festivalize will solve this by consolidating all his searching, comparing, and organizing tools in one place.

What's already out there: There is a lot of detailed information that can be found on festival’s individual sites, and there are quite a few aggregating festival search sites that already exist. What makes Festivalize distinctive is that it is an aggregating site that allows you to search in an interesting way (interactive map, filters, etc.) and within that same site you also have the tools to compare multiple festivals against each other. It keeps the number of tabs and windows open down to a minimum while you still glean all the festival information you need in order to make a decision whether to attend or not.

What I found was that most people wanted a search engine-type product, and they wanted all sorts of features. Some interesting suggestions brought to my attention were desires for User Reviews of recurring music festivals, and a way to further break down comparisons with day-by-day lineups for those festivals that last multiple days. Chipping away towards an MVP, I created these two personas:

After establishing the "User" I started mapping out the product's minimum viable product for the first prototype. For this first round I decided to focus on the FIND and COMPARE features for the desktop platform with minimum ORGANIZE and PLAN features.

And here are my wireframe stills:

User testing: Initial user testing suggests that a lot of time and research will need to be put into perfecting the filters and how the results will populate the interactive map. Some testers were confused as to whether to start a search or start with filters. But overall people like having the comparison drawer at the bottom at all times. 

Next steps: More user testing, and refining the features.