Austin Food & Wine Festival
Reimagining the festival website and bringing value to a cancelled event with strategic design.
overview
This is a conceptual project based on the Austin Food and Wine Festival (AFWF) website with purpose to better understand the importance of designing a mobile first platform for the festival in response to the pandemic and to bring more awareness to their non-profit partner the Austin Food and Wine Alliance (AFWA) and the culinary community. The opinions stated do not reflect and are not affiliated with the festival.
Industry: Restaurants, Events, Non-Profit
UX/UI Designers: Jackie Alejandro, Michael Dijak, Yao Xi
Team Role:
UX Researcher and Lead Product Designer
Duration:
12 days
Tools Used:
Figma, Lucid-chart, Mural, Zoom, Google Drive, Asana
Methods:
Screening surveys, User interviews, Heuristic evaluations, Competitive analysis, Usability tests, Affinity mapping, Empathy maps, Personas, Sketching, Wireframes, Prototyping, Style guides
just because the festival is cancelled, doesn’t mean it’s over.
What direction did we want to take as a team for the redesign of the mobile site?
Because the Austin Food & Wine Festival (AFWF) was cancelled due to covid-19 and rescheduled for 2021, there were many decisions we faced as a team in deciding what problem we wanted to address for the business and consumer and how we were going to do so.
We asked ourselves do we . . .
Design based on the consumers knowledge that the event was cancelled and they were previously notified?
Design as if the festival is still planning to operate?
the challenge
How to bring value to a cancelled event?
For the purpose of this redesign project, we continued the process with the intent of the website still operating with the users aware that the event is cancelled.
The main problem we encountered was how to make the AFWF website still relevant, while bringing awareness to their non profit partner, the Austin Food and Wine Alliance (AFWA).
Our hypothesis was that if we focus on the festival partner, AFWA, and incorporate the local Texas restaurants and chefs that were involved, the website would continue to remain valuable as a business and with their users, despite its cancellation.
research
Analyzing solutions through extensive research to highlight opportunities for growth
The main objective for our research was to identify solutions to an event cancellation, opinions/thoughts on donating and support local restaurants, and their experiences with food and wine festivals. We conducted a series of five user interviews with the intent of defining food and wine festival goers attitudes and behaviors in the midst of a pandemic.
In addition, we managed usability tests on the current festival website and our results indicated that users had a difficult time locating a donation options in lieu of the event cancellation and confused about the purpose of the non profit partner, AFWA.
Current home page
Briefly addresses non profit partner, AFWA, and provides a link to their website
Lack of donation options
No festival About page
Wall of text = an opportunity for growth in content hierarchy
Image courtesy of AFWA website
Learning from our competitors
In a competitive analysis, we compared four main features across two competitor festival sites: covid-19 updates, charity partners, donate options, and restaurant partnerships. From the gathered data, the Austin Food and Wine Festival website showed many opportunities to grow in light of the current circumstances.
Identifying our users and finding common thought patterns
To better understand who our user is and reasons for future design choices, my team and I conducted five user interviews. We wanted to find out why people attended festivals and what to expect if the event was cancelled. From the results of the interviews and brainstorming (affinity mapping and empathy maps), we found that there were two types of festival goers and created two personas , which we named Social Sam and Comfortable Cam.
Although both personas exuded different behaviors as festival goers, my team and I discovered a common thought pattern: the need for supporting their local culinary community. Based on our user interviews, all participants were passionate about giving back to restaurants affected by covid-19 and interested in having different options to support.
Moving forward, we centered our design around the tasks and challenges that users would face when using the festival website by prioritizing options for getting involved, while still highlighting the AFWA.
what I learned
My team and I decided to continue our redesign by keeping both personas in mind and mainly focusing on their common goal of getting more involved with the local restaurant community.
In retrospect, I would concentrate on the primary user persona, Social Sam, for the purpose of the redesign and then incorporate the needs of the secondary persona in future iterations of the website. This way we could create a more specific user centered design by possibly going more in depth with curated user paths and evaluating high impact, low cost design with those users in usability tests.
design studio
Facilitating a design studio based on my visual design expertise
There was a team consensus to have me lead the design portion of the project, but I wanted to focus on making our prototype a collaboration rather than taking full ownership.
Because of my strong background in visual design, I wanted to take leadership by facilitating a design studio where we deduced our research, sketched multiple wireframes for our website structure, and collaborated as creatives to produce a collective design for the website prototypes, keeping in mind our main goal for our user, giving back.
The outcome resulted in a team agreement upon content hierarchy regarding website elements to focus on before we began to prototype:
Information about the AFWF and AFWA
Covid-19 update/current event status
Event partnerships
Ways to help/get involved
what I learned
For the purpose of mobile first design, this design process forced me to prioritize the content hierarchy and deem what information was the most important for our user.
The benefit of this workshop enabled me to take on a leadership role in managing the design and to explore a multitude of solutions rather than honing in on the most obvious one. It challenged me as a designer to critically think in terms of problem solving, critique our ideas, and practice communication within a team.
In the future, I would continue to practice design studios because the process enable teams to think more about synthesis of their research and how one can apply it to the design. These joint iterations can generate ideas and solutions that may not be possible as an individual.
mobile site redesign
what are the main design focuses?
With mobile first design in mind, we focused on three main points for the website based on the common goals our participants and personas.
1.
Emphasize the partnership with the Austin Food & Wine Alliance. (Who are they? What do they do?). Under the “About” section in the menu, there is a separate page dedicated to learning more about the festival partner.
2.
Provide users with more getting involved options. Similar to the competitor sites, we created a separate “Get Involved” page, which provides users many options to help out the local restaurant community.
3.
Generate value to website, despite the event cancellation. Since the festival is postponed until next year, a main focus of the redesign was to find a way to maintain traffic to the festival website in the meantime.
iterations
Testing the prototype through multiple usability tests
By applying our main design focuses we gave users a reason to stay connected to the festival website by addressing the AFWA, provided a “Get Involved” page similar to the competitors presenting multiple options of how to donate/support, and overall adding value to the website.
As a team, we conducted two series of usability tests with our prototype (V1 and V2). For V1, we facilitated a total of six usability tests with our lo-fi prototype. My team and I held design iterations workshop to produce our V2 hi-fi prototype, which we tested among seven participants.
The design choices we made were well received because users were able to navigate easily throughout the mobile site, but most importantly able to identify who the AFWA was.
Below are a few design iterations we made based on the feedback of the participants.
Creating separate "About" pages for AFWF and AFWA
Adding "Home" to navigation menu
Changing section verbiage
style guide
I crafted a style guide for the redesign of the AFWF website.
prototype
Take a tour of the mobile first design concept for the Austin Food and Wine Festival.
conclusion
My team and I worked diligently and seamlessly to produce a mobile first site for the Austin Food and Wine Festival. By designing based on the actual circumstances, we were able to understand the issue many businesses faced with the repercussions of the pandemic and how to assist to keeping a business valuable while maintaining a relationship with their users.
Understanding the importance of mobile first design
With this project, I learned that designing for mobile first simply means creating a content-led design based on finding the right balance between branding and displaying what’s most important. In addition, leading the design portion of the project gave me more confidence as a designer in visuals and project management.
next steps
Since the festival is postponed until next year, we believe there are plenty of opportunities to grow and expand the festival website in the meantime. With more time I would like to:
Go more in depth with fundraising ideas, such as hosting virtual events (cooking demonstrations, celebrity chef master class, etc.) that will benefit the local culinary community and keep the festival relevant
Take the mobile first design and apply it to a desktop and tablet version