Glow Festival
iPad Pro application
Overview
Every year, students from Edinburgh College's Creative Industries courses showcase their talents with a number of unique performances and exhibitions at venues across the city as part of the Glow Festival.
The Glow Festival iPad Pro application was exclusively designed to combine all Glow Festival events listed on the Citizen Tickets portal with an entertaining and enjoyable booking process to collect data on users' preferences.
My role
Web Designer and Developer
I participated in Sprint Design, created a prototype, and developed the application's front end.
Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Citizen Tickets API, Bitbucket
Team: stakeholders, business representatives, students representing different IT departments
Timeframe: four weeks, five-day Sprint Design process
Research Goals
- Identifying user, business, and system requirements for the Glow Festival application
- Designing an iPad Pro application for the Glow Festival (2019 edition)
- Identifying tools and developing the application within given timeframes
Understanding the problem
At the initial meeting, I learned that the Glow Festival application should provide information about all of the performances, shows, and exhibitions. It should also collect users' interests and preferences regarding the offerings and be compatible with the Citizen Tickets booking application.
The application's design should offer an interactive and enjoyable user experience for the target audience, and it should include Glow Festival branding elements.
Due to my role in the team, I focused on providing insight into user-system interaction, system architecture, and developing the front end of the application.
Gathering insight
To gain a comprehensive understanding of the Glow Festival application requirements, I took part in a Sprint Design session. Through collaborative teamwork, I engaged in the following activities to build foundational knowledge:
- workshop with stakeholders and business representatives (identifying business and system requirements)
- user journey analysis (understanding user tasks and their current challenges)
- interview with Citizen Ticket developers (identifying technical challenges)
- analysing branding and style of Glow Festival assets to create consistency between website and mobile app
Research methods
Sprint Design
The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.
Working together in a sprint, the team could shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week.
Spring Design Photo Gallery
Identifying long-term goals
Discussion with stakeholders, business representatives, designers, and developers
Ideas improvement
Review of existing ideas, sketching and critical thinking
Storyboard
Selected sketches and solutions as a step-by-step plan for a prototype
Prototyping
Creating a prototype and writing an interview script
At the end of the Sprint Design, I helped create a realistic prototype in Figma.
The data from usability testing helped us make final amendments, and I was able to start building the first version of the application.
Development
I worked in a team of three developers. My tasks focused on developing the front end and connecting the Citizen Tickets API with the application.
I used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to develop the app, and Bitbucket to upload my part of the work.
Glow festival application screens on iPad Pro
The application was advertised on the Edinburgh College website.
The main page encourages users to take a short, fun quiz; however, users still have the option to skip this part and proceed directly to the events page.
Each interaction with an image changed its colour to indicate selection.
The user was presented with various types of images to help refine their event selection process.
We collected information on the user's preferences as requested by the client.
Additionally, progress indicators in the form of dots were provided at the top of the interface.
To keep the user's attention, short, funny statements were used for the selection of event types or timeframes.
Final steps and an option to send the results to the user's email.
The Quiz results screen displayed a selection of events according to the user's preferences, along with the top navigation :
- All events - the user can access all available events
- My events - quiz results saved for later
- Quiz - user can retake the quiz
- I'm done - brings the user back to the landing page
After selecting a specific event, the user can see more information and book a ticket.
Learnings & Challenges
The design process of the application has offered me valuable opportunities to learn different design techniques and tools, and to work closely with stakeholders, designers, and developers. I had the opportunity to share my ideas regarding application design, usability, and system requirements from a developer's perspective.
I also learned how to connect the Citizen Tickets API with our application, which was a challenging but rewarding experience that allowed me to practice and improve my technical skills.
Having this experience allowed me to explore and significantly expand my skillset within the design stage, as well as in the development and deployment stages.
