Planr was conceived through the discovery of a common problem often complained about: poor planning.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

People seek clarity in their weekend plans but often find ambiguity when others fail to communicate, commit or plan ahead.

USER INTERVIEWS

From the point of discovery this problem I looked to those complaining as users and found out what their common processes and pain points were through a series of interviews. I interviewed 10 different potential users in my demographic and brought together so key takeaways. Users wanted plan details consolidated in to one place that was very black and white as to what was happening. They wanted insights on attendance and live editable lists to execute acquiring the things they needed to make their plans a reality.

COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

From there I dove into competitive research and mainly looked into the tools my users were currently using: Facebook events, Groupme, Googledocs. I determined what these apps were doing right and where they were failing short. I chose to combine and optimize the benefits of using these tools while focusing on the details my users sought after. 

PERSONAS

At this point I felt informed enough to create two contrasting personas. Enter Busy Brittany. She's a school teacher with little free time on her hands. Therefore she doesn't want to browse social media or scroll through long group messages to be in the loop. She seeks a straightforward solution to her pain points of feeling unprepared or uninformed. 

And here’s social Sam. He likes to make the most of his free time but gets frustrated when others aren’t on board. He wants to be in the know for weekend plans so he can schedule accordingly and do all the things he wants to do.

From there I mapped user needs to features to get a clear sight of what application would solve my problem. Along the way I discovered a lot of potential features I could implement but were not sought out by my current users. I used the Moscow Method to determine what was immediately necessary and end up with a planning tool framed for my users.

"Mapping feedback to features was challenging when viewpoints would sway back and forth like a pendulum."

Busy Brittany can scroll down the Event Feed to see what's going on. Social Sam can plan events and see who's committed with the Headcount feature. He can organize lists of what people need to bring and see who's signed up for them. If either user has any confusion of event details they can message about it in the Event Chat. 

USABILITY TESTING

I began sketching out my userflows into how they would fit in an application. I uploaded those sketches into Marvel and performed Usability testing. I tested 3 different users making sure they understood the flow of the wireframes. 

From there I began to add fidelity and performed more user testing. I added a Create an Account option on the opening screen and added text to my icons so users were not confused by the actions they were talking when clicking them. The menu bar had a plus icon that confused users so I altered it and added text. One user claimed they would like to see the host of the event and that was added to the Event screen. Most users were confused by the New Event page so it was labeled "Host an Event" and "Post Event to Feed". Buttons and chat received shadowing to show interactive areas to be clickable options. One user pointed out that lists should show the status of completion before you click on them to avoid unnecessary action so "All set!" as well as other key words were added. It was noted that Chats and Lists shouldn't need search bars and should be chronological by dates. Dates and lines were added to distinguish chats. Overall, usability testing allowed me to make the tweaks that made Planr easier to navigate and understand.