A solution to increase event attendance KPI by utilizing friend-making to drive attendance on event RSVPs
Adulting is hard- but making friends as an adult is harder.
Getting out and meeting new people can be intimidating- but Y’all helps to reduce the friction inherent to getting out, going places, and meeting people.
Problem
On average, 80% of people who RSVP to events do not attend the event as planned.
The goal was to increase the conversion rate of the number of people who attend events.
Solution
Create a way for users to find new friends to attend events with. Attending events alone can be intimidating and trigger social anxiety.
Challenges
Quantifying the factors that affect the attendance of events and determining some of the root causes of social anxiety in these situations.
Allowing users to connect with someone they know and feel comfortable with will encourage them to attend events and create a sense of accountability between attendees.
Matching System
See if friends and/or contacts are RSVP’ed to an event
Send reminders to friends and share events
Find compatible people who are interested in similar events
Develop camaraderie before meeting in person
Accountability to attend in-person events
See Who’s Going
Discovery and Synthesis
The main issue was dealing with RSVP-ers who failed to attend the event. The focus of research needed to discover:
the motivations for or against attendance
how to alleviate social anxiety
Competitor Analysis
Discovery & Synthesis
The engagement gap: competitors’ focus on emails and notifications doesn’t do enough to keep users excited about attending events. The focus should be shifted in a more social direction.
Key Findings
Meetup and Eventbrite make finding and signing up for relevant events easy.
Searching for events is reasonably straightforward, with the ability to filter results by specific criteria.
Meetup, Facebook, and Eventbrite all allow people to message other event attendees through the app.
Competitors focus primarily on events. It could be easier to see who else is attending events users have RSVP’ed to. There is little motivation for users to use messaging features related to events.
Discovery & Synthesis
Interviews and Affinity Map
Interviews revealed important factors preventing people from attending events could be broken down into a few categories:
Event Logistics such as location, venue, weather
Going to Events with other people
Interests
Key Interview Insights:
Social pressure, peer pressure, and finding events related to interests are motivators for attending events.
Attending events to meet others in their career field is also a motivating factor.
Free or low-cost events are highly preferred, although paying for an event increases the accountability for attendance.
Factors that keep people from going to events include location, event logistics, and whether they know anyone attending- which ties into social anxiety
Meeting a large group at once is intimidating- meeting with someone you know makes it easier to meet others and be social.
Making new friends is easier if you meet them through other friends or people you know.
Our Users
Based on research, Y’all’s personas represent two major archetypes: Socially Anxious Event-goers and those Seeking to Expand Connections.
Research showed that there were two main archetypes of Y’alls' personas - socially anxious people and people who are focused on expanding their social circle.
While there is some overlap between archetypes and their goals, the needs of each persona vary in distinct ways. For example, James (our socially anxious archetype) needs extra clarity about event details and reminders in advance about the event to ensure that he is mentally prepared, while Amy (our seeking to expand connections archetype) needs a way to find out about events that her friends or contacts are attending to keep her accountable to attend events she has RSVP'd to.
Sketches
Since Y’all integrates event-finding and friend-making features, a big challenge during sketching was to determine how best to communicate what users could do in the app and how to do it.
Even though I had a road map for the event finding and Friend making flow, the specific screens still needed clarification.
Most dating/friendship apps require users to spend most of their time within the app swiping through the profiles of other users. This can also be an intimidating aspect of similar apps- the fear of rejection or worrying about not finding anyone to match with- especially for our primary persona.
I wanted to include a similar component, but as a secondary component to interact with, it allowed users to revisit people with similar interests in their area.
Users would be able to save matches that they would like to chat with or meet up with, but if they chose to focus on events, they would be able to find people attending the events they are interested in who are also suggested matches.
This would allow multiple opportunities for the user to find someone to chat with before attending an event while also reducing the stress of swiping through many profiles.
Instead, the focus shifts to attending events to attend physically and finding others who are also interested in going.
Wireframes, Initial Tests
Key Findings:
Without the context of an onboarding flow, it took users a bit of exploring and thinking to understand what a “match” was.
2/3 participants did relate the word match to dating apps such as Tinder, so they were able to interpret it through that context.
In the initial design, the home page was too simple, only displaying cards of “Suggested Events.” Users expected to potentially also see “Events Near you” and “Events Friends are going to”- to provide them with additional options to browse on the home page.
Branding and UI Design
The friendly orange brand color and round soft edges chosen exemplify Y’alls’ mission to help people make new friends and find things to do.
Colors: Orange was chosen because of its positive associations with energy, youth, cheer, excitement, adventure, and warmth.
Typefaces: Urbanist and Inter were chosen for their easy readability and round, friendly appearance.
Logo: Designed to fit with Urbanist and create a playful, warm tone.
Brand Name: The name Y’all was chosen because it captures the inclusive and welcoming spirit of the brand while also being the perfect term for addressing a group of friends.
Iterations
To fix the usability issues that I found during testing, I made the following changes:
Created a “Code of Conduct” screen to ensure new users would understand the expectations for interaction and the inclusive, positive experience of using Y’all.
Adjusted the “Saved” page design to improve the visual hierarchy between “Saved Events” and “Liked Matches”, so that both categories of saved/liked items would be more equal hierarchically.
Changed the design of the “Go with someone” screen to ensure clarity of matches vs friends by making slight adjustments to the copy.
Updated the “Suggested Match” card on the home page to ensure that users would know that they can go through and “Like” or “Pass” on matches suggested to them based on their personality and event preferences.
Created a block function that allows users to block someone they do not wish to interact with easily.
Changed the iconography to a more neutral “Heart” or “X” based on feedback from testing.
Results
Feedback from the final round of testing validated that users were more likely to RSVP and attend an event with others and that finding people similar to them encouraged them to attend an in-person event with someone instead of getting stuck in the cycle of trying to find someone to match with.
KPIs were met, resulting in an increased follow-through on attendance to event RSVPs
Next Steps
Given the opportunity, continue user testing to validate my assumptions regarding how social anxiety impacts users’ interactions with the app.
Account for edge cases- for example, if no one who has RSVPed or liked an event you are interested in meets your preferences, offering an option to adjust/expand preferences or suggest an alternate relevant event.
Expand on other ideas for features that assist users with getting to the event, such as rideshare or parking features.