
PROJECT TITLE
Google Hangouts Event Organiser
PROJECT BRIEF
How do you make ad hoc event coordination as convenient and comfortable as your daily routine? Detail a digital service that provides individual assistance for attendees of a group social event such as a night out for dinner and a movie.
CLIENT
YEAR
2015
ROLE
Self-initiated to demonstrate a UX process
UNDERSTANDING BRIEF & PLANNING
The brief asks to make organising events as easy as ‘daily routine.’ In my assumption ‘daily routine’ implies that users don’t need to learn or install new applications to achieve it. Thus, I will look for design opportunities from what the potential users’ do on a daily basis on online/mobile space and what they do to coordinate ad hoc types of events.
RESEARCH & IDEATION
According to the Exact Target’s 2014 Mobile Behaviour Report (p.13, source link), ‘Text Messaging(90%)’ and ‘Accessing email(91%)’ are the most often performed activities on smartphones. Then, I started mapping out how people coordinate ad hoc parties, based on my assumption and personal experience. After the initial exploration, I started look for channels and user behaviours that could fall into ‘daily routine’ to decide a service platform and direction.
Within the ‘daily routine’ framework, I have two platform options, messengers and emails. Considering the types of events to be dealt with and types of people that users would invite, for example, night out for dinner, movie, and sushi night, I concluded that messengers are the better platform to organise via swift communication as a part of daily routine. In addition to that, group conversation rooms could be created for fun, but also it could be created for a purpose, like organising events. However, it lacks features needed to organise events. Therefore, I decided to extend an existing messenger service, Google Hangouts.(image on the right side) Then, I checked out Hangouts’ group chat features to identify what additional features needed to be added to it. Below is the list of features that can help users to coordinate an ad hoc event. From the list, I’ll prioritise features and will find opportunities to plug in the prioritised features to the current Hangouts group chat.
TASK MODEL & SCENARIOS
During sketching task models, I came up with an idea that group conversation rooms could have context-aware engine that can automatically help and suggest developing event to-do lists, RSVPs, and anything related to the event.
Once a user created a group conversation room, the user can add the ‘event organiser’ functionality. The user set an initial state of the event (e.g.title, time, location, to-dos and etc.) then, as the conversation happens the engine makes suggestions to the host not to miss any possible changes that happened during the conversation and help the user to modify the event state easily, but also attendees have some level of control over the event state.
After the event date is expired, the event related digital artefacts(e.g. photos, location and music) can be shared to Google Plus or any social networks.
WIREFRAME SKETCHES
FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS
1. Event details screen for invitees
2. Accumulated context-aware events
3. Multiple events for the same group of people
4. Multiple locations, times
5. List sync with to-do apps
6. Less intrusive context-aware dialog interaction
7. Group chat state on conversation list
LET’S TALK
Based in South Korea. Currently open for opportunities.
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