Komeeda 3.0
Improve the experience of hosting an event
My Role:
UX/UI Designer
Teammate:
Product Managers, Eng Team
Duration:
Three Months
In 2016, I redesigned Komeeda’s website to improve the overall customer experience. Luckily, the team successfully implemented the design and start gaining lots of media exposure. As time goes by and the business grows, the website is in need of a new redesign, which will primarily focus on the homepage and the user flow of becoming a host at Komeeda for business users (restaurant owner, chef, etc).
For those who don’t know what Komeeda is, Komeeda.com is a marketplace to discover unique food events, taste exciting new foods, discover new restaurants, and interact with other interesting guests, in addition to the passionate chefs who want to share their stories. Chefs have an essential role in all the Komeeda events, so we want to improve the experience of applying to host and creating events to better serve chefs’ needs.
Talk to Stakeholders
To start the project, I first talked to two stakeholder from the Komeeda team to understand their expectations and the targeted users. I was informed that the user flows I need to focus on are: homepage and acquisition of event host. The targeted audience are chefs and restaurant owners, who will be interested and able to host a food event on Komeeda.
Competitor Analysis
The discussion with stakeholders also helped me identify four competitors or inspirations, which have similar business model with Komeeda or the aesthetics the team like. I analyzed their homepage design, host acquisition flow and the consistency and differences between desktop and mobile experiences.
Wireframe & Prototype
With all the insights from stakeholders and inspirations, I started wireframing both the desktop and mobile experience. Throughout the process, I iterated a few times based on some informal user testings and critique.
User Testing
After several internal iterations, I requested to schedule some users testings with real users. With the help of Komeeda team, I scheduled two users testing session with one chef and one restaurant owner, who have both used Komeeda and some other websites to create and host events before.
"This is great. You just solved all the problems I have."
"It's definitely sleek. I really like the event preview on the side."
Overall, they spoke highly of the prototypes and considered it greatly improves the current experience. At the meantime, they also gave me lots of in-depth feedback to enhance every details of the experience.
HI-FI PROTOTYPE
Based on the feedback from user testing, I revised the prototype to make it more usable and desirable. The final prototype proposed a more straightforward way for business users to register and create events, which will help Komeeda scale up the business by acquiring more event hosts and reducing the amount of time the team need to put in to assist the event creation.
The mobile prototype will also better serve the need of accessing Komeeda from smartphone. It’s the first time the team really focus on improving the mobile experience. In the future, more mobile-focused considerations will be placed into the future design, such as optimizing the experience of monitoring sales on mobile because that’s one of the main tasks the business users conduct on mobile phone.
(Interact with the mobile prototype here!)
Conclusion & Learning
This is not doubt a rewarding design experience which motivates me to learn more about first-time user experience, mobile-friendly, and building tools for UGC (user generated content). As a UX designer, one of the biggest challenges always comes from lacking of the knowledge of the industry or users. The easiest way is to invest time in talking to users and asking for their feedback. In this project, I would say half of my learning actually comes from user testing where I found the users are so knowledgeable about the tools they are using. They pay attention to all the details and have a lot of useful suggestions. They not only provide feedback of short-term solutions, but also share their long-term expectations.
Good design comes from iteration. I’m also glad to see how Komeeda’s design evolves from the very beginning, which teaches me to focus on the most imperative problems at a time. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” There is always a tradeoff between width and depth of a project. As a business grows, paying attention to details will become more and more important. As a startup, Komeeda is heading to the right directions.