Gala.lk
My Role
Mobile UX/UI Design, Web UX/UI Design & Web Development
Other Members
Dylan Seedin, Ahmed Kamel
Location & Year
Colombo, Sri Lanka ©2021
Overview
Gala.lk is an app with its purpose to help users have an efficent and organized lifestyle including event management with access to all top class vendors around them. The app also assist wedding couples in booking and preparing their wedding ceremony by giving them the ability to easily book venues, vendors and streamline the whole process. The user can also book public events, movies or hotel rooms providing complete convience to the users lifestyle.
The Goal
Busy indiviudals need a well customized and easy tracking vendor booking system for all their lifestyle needs from wedding planning to taking their family on nice vacation while providing options for customization. The goal is to design an app that helps finding venues, vendors and event management in one place. I highly priortized understanding the challenges that users might face in the booking and reservation processes.
Process
I conducted user interviews and empathy maps to understand the users and their needs. There are two specific user groups that fits as ideal candidates based on high pain points: Individuals who wish to have a smarter lifestyle - booking a movie ticket, booking a hotel room, event tickets or make a table reservation in a quick and efficent way. Couples who wish to be married but need to find a much efficent way to organize their wedding instead of tedious tasks such as booking venues and bearing vendor cancellations.
Interview Goal
The goal is to understand the process users have to take in order to make bookings with vendors and how long couples take to prepare for their wedding. I need to carefully analyse their needs vs their frustrations to comply with time, ettiques and priorities. It is important to understand the current process and timeline of users to make vendor bookings, organize events vs their pain which makes it easier to find loop holes and provide effective UX design solutions. Below are some of the painpoints highlighted during the interview process:
Pain Points
These user groups validates the initial assumptions we made but research all reveals that event planning and organizing is not the problem. Availability of the vendors is key to creating an successful lifestyle and event plan app to provide visibility to users with a state of the art booking and reservation system with real-time availility. Prices need to be visible instead of users having to call each vendor back and forth to check for prices that fits their budget.
Based on the painpoints of user groups, I built a user persona that represents the ideal target audience of the app where most of the problems are common to all other groups. This will be used as a representation of the customers to marketing and development teams to ensure all stakeholders have the same target in mind when we contribute to the app building process.
— John H
John is a software engineer and generally lazy all the time. He prefers to do things in a smart way rather than putting alot of effort to do simple tasks. John will not step outside to catch a cab but rather book it via uber to get a cab in a easy and efficent way. His family has been hinting him to get married but he is overwhelmed by the idea of wedding preparations and wish to take no part in it. He loves automation and believes that modern problems require modern solutions.
- I dont like to visit all the cinema websites to check for availability
- I dont know how, when and where to start planning the wedding
- I dont like having to decide and find vendors for every single thing from deco, setup, band, lights excitement
- I dont like to wait for my turn to get a haircut neither make calls for appointment
- I want to go out and check out events that are interesting and close to my location without asking someone or checking through social media
- Can book movies at any cinema through online booking system
- To easily organize and celebrate his wedding in a stress free approach and enjoy every moment with his friends and family.
- Can book the next public event to make new friends and have fun.
- Can focus on his work and complete his tasks without thinking about wedding planning
- Can take his fiancee on a beautiful date night to a fancy restuarant by making the table reservation in a smarter way.
Problem Statement
John is a young engineer who is an introvert and minimalist. He dislikes the fact that there is no proper solution for all his lifestyle needs from booking a movie, organizing a wedding to making a table reservation at his favourite restaurant.
Mapping personas user journey revealed how helpful it will be for users to have access to a dedicated lifestyle & event app. This helps gain insights into common customer pain points so we can design an app that delivers a more optimised and personalised customer experiences.
The purpose of this phase is to understand the competition around the business to ensure gala.lk has a competitive advantage by analysing their competitors features and services to look for gaps that gala.lk can use as opporunities. Here, we analysed wedding, event planner, hotel and tabe reservation apps.
Wedding planner app
Wedding planner app with checklist, budgets and venues
Digital wedding planning app
Travel App for hotel & home reservation deals
Table reservation system
Gaps
During research on the competitor apps, my primary focus was to figure out if the competitor apps actually solved the user groups problems. I concluded on the competitor gaps that gala can capitilize on to have a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Key user flows such as registration, searching for a vendor, checking for availability, booking a vendor etc lack user experience.
No proper guidance on what to expect after app registration. Where does the customer go to once they click this button? Or what happens if they do something else instead? Its quite clear that the userflows and journey maps were not used as a priority during the app building process.
All discussions, confirmation or planning are done verbally through a phone or email conversation without a streamline process in place.
The branding and the overall presentation needs improvement. It does not have to be fancy but it needs to look professional and at the same time, implement good UX and performance.
The app offers generic solution, there are no packages that a user can customize to suit their needs.
Lacking multilanguage support. This is important as you cant assume everyone knows english. This is key to achieving a good user experience.
By synthesizing all the data from user research, insights are generated, grouped and prioritized. As a result, value propositions for gala.lk are established.
An app listing local venues with easy booking with price estimation, guidance, simple booking flow and availability check.
Offer hand-picked packages based on users inputs and offer customization options.
Create a direct, straight forward process for users to book venues, vendors and managing event preparations.
The app needs to support multiple languages and metrics unit support system.
Present relevant information with clear structure and assist users in achieving and comprehending data easily as they need.
Provide seamless experience and transparent process so that users always get up to date about their progress.
Accurate data with high credibility, streamline process, allowing users to perform all necessary outcomes.
Empower users with full fledge customization ability, along with recover or cancel their actions with minimal to zero impact.
