Event Matchmaker Website
vendorspace
A matchmaking application that connects event planners and vendors to reduce the stress of finding event opportunities. vendorspace has gone live! Please visit: vendorspace.co
Platform: Website Team: 2 UX Designers
Background: Having experienced the obstacles and challenges of organizing events, Ify Ifebi, CEO, postulated a hypothesis that has become her passion — Atlanta-based startup, vendorspace: a platform as simple and easy to use as Tinder where event planners and vendors can find one another.
Challenge: To validate the hypothesis that Vendors and event planners need a quick way to connect like a matchmaking site. Find the MVP and primary user and design a platform that makes event planning/working more immidiate and less stressful.
Goal & Process: Our goal was to treat this project like a sprint in order to speed the process to get investor feedback.
We employed techniques from Sprint:
A creative process that quickly takes a project from problem to prototype
Devised by three design partners at Google Ventures.
User Research/ Interviews
First we focused on the vendor. Between Ify and us we knew many vendors. We interviewed these creative individuals who offered valuable insights into their process of finding events to work.
Affinity Mapping from Vendor Interviews
Take aways from vendor interviews
Vendors find events through Facebook, Eventbrite, or Google Searching
They advertise themselves through Instagram
Community/Network is most important with word of mouth being the dominate way to get jobs
Art/Passion- The reason for starting this career path
Marketing a burden
Their business- They want to stay away from time consuming paperwork
Most have future goals of growing
Vendor Personas
1. DJ Fat Stacks is our main persona-Wants to DJ unique events (not weddings) but it's hard to break into the NY scene.
2. Food vendor is secondary persona-Wants to get more event gigs but is waiting for event planners to contact her/doesn't like marketing.
Then we turned our focus toward event planners
We conducted phone interviews with a variety of event planners from festivals to weddings
Affinity Mapping of Event Planner Interviews
Planner Personas
1. Pernell is a constant planner- Remotely planning a festival that is growing, having a difficult time finding a venue he trusts remotely
2. Penny is a one time planner- Planning her wedding in Mexico, wants original entertainment but only trusts word of mouth
We compared features of similar event market place sites
Sketching of Eventbrite searching for events
Sketch of Gigmasters search for events page | Facebook's events ad listings
Problem Statements:
Planners: Want to find new talent but don’t have time to go looking for it and usually find people through word of mouth or posting to Facebook.
Vendors: Want to focus on their services and are frustrated by the marketing aspect of their business.
Storyboard of the Site Flow
Using the 5 Day Sprint Storyboarding method we drew out 15 frames of a flow which included multiple ways to display filter events page.
Then, we sketched what vendorspace could look like...
Wireframes that were iterations of one screen (filters of searching events)
Why and what:
Based on Tinder where events move horizontally
Hamburger menu filter bar with results of events are larger/full screen.
A compromise between where filters are always present and events are clearly presented full screen to show 6 events at once.
Filters take up almost half the screen leaving room for 3 events to be seen at a time. The events more vertically.
We are in the process of testing the prototype with users and making iterations before creating high fidelity mockups.
Wireframes: Clickable Prototype
Click here to view my blog post about this project!