Project Overview
Research & Strategy
Vision Document
Statement of Work
Flowcharts
Business Research
Product Management
The first step in this project was to lay out how the app should behave, and how we wanted users to interact with it. In order to do this, I looked at many other event-specific applications, taking notes on the features they included and which we needed. I also made note of specific things we needed to keep in mind that were industry and company specific - for example, Boyd Gaming only allows users age 21+ to participate in contests, but junior users were allowed to download the app with limited access to features.
In addition to creating documentation to support our vision and getting approval from management on the planned work, I also created flowcharts to make note of what path we expected users to take from each page. Some of these ended up being very short flows, while others became very complex quickly. These flowcharts greatly informed what wireframes got made, and helped us decide which features to pursue and which we ultimately decided not to include.
Wireframes
Wireframes
UX/UI Design
Photoshop
With all the setup work having been approved, I was asked to get lo-fi wireframes set up for management to review and approve. For this, I took inspiration from other event apps and the style of the time (2016), as well as taking into the more "old-timey" feel that our company and brand had. It took less than a week to get all the wireframes completed, and they were quickly approved from there.
When I submitted the wireframes, my manager commented that they were the most detailed wireframes they had ever seen, and this got me put in charge of all wireframing projects at the company moving forward.
Design & Development Handoff
Once the wireframes had been approved, I worked with our graphic designer to outfit the wireframes with a more "rodeo" style feel. I gave a full overview of the wireframes and additional screens we would need that had not been made as part of the wireframe effort, as well as the kind of graphics I felt would be needed in sections that were describing certain events.
Once the mockups were done and approved, the project was passed back to me and our back-end developer for coding and implementation. This involved making sure all the image assets had been exported for us in the proper sizes, as many of the elements - such as our buttons - were images rather than CSS. This meant there ended up being relatively little to code on the front end, so most of my efforts went to testing the setup in the content management system to ensure we would be able to use it easily and quickly to make on-site updates.
Challenges
Whenever we were asked what the big challenge of making the app was, we would answer with "we don't understand rodeos". No one on our team had ever attended one before, and we knew very little about them in general. This resulted in us spending a lot of extra time having to do research on rodeos and spending time talking to rodeo experts in order to write the content needed to educate users in similar situations to us.
But after launch, the real challenge ended up being not having access to anything similar to the event before the first showing. Despite sitting down and trying to follow along with recorded events on Youtube to get the timing down, our rodeo ended up having a shorter event format than the ones we had found, so users often didn't have time to guess the score before it was announced. Additionally, we were attending the event and didn't even have enough time to input scores before the next one would be announced, so rather than updating one by one, we switched to updating only once all participants of a certain event were done.
Outcome
Overall, the app and event were considered to be a success, though it did take a large revision to get there. The first year of the event, only 26% of our customers downloaded the app, and even fewer participated on it due to the timing issue we had noted. However, those that did use it loved it, and in speaking with customers after the event, we found the lack of downloads was mostly due to them not realizing there was even an app to download.
After the event, we met and planned out a big redesign and process change for the following year, a big part of which involved coordinating with marketing, event planners, and venue staff to get word of the app out to customers before they arrived at the event. This resulted in around 67% of attendees downloading the app the following year, and a smoother process of tracking scoring for both us and our users.
