Time to take a five seconds breather after Assignment 3 submission. I always wanted to do a reflection on the UI/UX lecture by Su Yuen in week 2, mainly because I always believed in UI making or breaking a product and that being said, as a coder with no “formal training” in UI/UX (ok, I admit it’s more like I didn’t research/learn on my own…), this lecture in particular was an eye-opener for me.
UI/UX Lecture: Highlights
To summarize, these are some key steps that a good UI/UX practitioner should undertake:
- User requirements gathering: persona, interviews
- Ugly wireframes: sketch fast & ditch them fast (no need to feel overly attached)
- Mockups: tools such as InVision, Adobe XD
- Test and Iterate
- Frontend implementation: Templates, UI kits, themes, libraries…
Applying what I learnt: Case study of Eventbrite
Because my team’s assignment 1 idea was to build an event management platform geared towards helping event organizers fund events through sourcing for sponsorships, one thing I did was to review Eventbrite, one of the most popular platforms for event planning, promotion and ticketing. Eventbrite is currently at $196.78M of total equity funding, and completed 7 acquisitions (!!!) so far. What makes Eventbrite so popular and stand out from its competitors with similar offerings? Here I will pick out two UI/UX wins from Eventbrite’s platform.
Here we see that the call to action is centralized i.e. the carousel showcasing past clients and their successes. In terms of the images used and copywriting, the site has employed the use of logos to visually and succinctly convey the message, and action words (“we’ve helped our clients sell more than 25 million…”) and statistics to logically convince users that Eventbrite is useful for event organizers!
Here we see that Eventbrite makes the onboarding process for event organizers as hassle-free as possible, by requiring only a minimal number of fields to be entered. In fact, after creating your event using this basic form, you will realize that there are many more configurable options! This shows that it is not necessary to flesh out every single feature to users at the onset, as much as this might seem counter-intuitive. In fact, first-time users appreciate brevity and simplicity of onboarding so they can quickly try the app or platform out for themselves to make a verdict. If Eventbrite had implemented a lengthy form that consist of all its configurable fields, then some users might be driven away from the site because of the hassle and just go back to whatever event management tool (or lack thereof) that they were previously using.