Event planners have to juggle tons of info & tasks
Event planners face the challenge of coordinating information for participants, volunteers, vendors, and attendees across various phases.
For planners, success is a happy attendee
05
planners interviewed
30
Cards
Sorted
06
competitors
audited
Planners consider events successful when the audience is engaged. This requires seamless coordination. Meet planner Divya & vendor Trent, two people crucial to an event’s success, but with different metrics for success.
Things get chaotic when there are too many tasks to coordinate
Planners, who have to coordinate with 10+ people sometimes, end up receiving 100s of notifications, which can create a lot of room for error in communication.
Problem 2
Current event management tools leave tasks unorganized
An industry analysis reveals that:
Most event management tools are optimized for attendee tracking and data collection.
Attendee centric planning tools are far more robust than event management/coordination planning tools.
One tool for communication, planning & coordination
Divya, as a planner, can easily and asynchronously update Trent and his team about important changes by simply updating a task within the 'AV' Category of a Project, ensuring all communication remains consolidated in one place.
Haystack organizes an event into
A folder to organize categories, tasks & people
Groups of tasks assigned to the same people
Assigned items to be completed
Define
Quick & organized access to task information
Set up to show users who is doing what
Built around the task-flows defined above, Haystack's solution was defined by thinking through how a User might interact with the their projects.
Ideate
Evolution around a user’s relationship with tasks & projects
Task-flow driven design & prototyping drove the iteration & testing in the stages of fidelity leading up to the final prototype.
Users can get to assigned tasks quickly...
By being able to view your To-Do list wholistically, to being able to find tasks in a browser, Haystack is designed to make it as easy as possible to find what you need to do.
and also see them in the context of the project.
Information is shared to users through Tasks.
Tasks are then organized into Categories.
These Categories of Tasks make up Projects.
Users found it helpful for Tasks to present Project & Category information in their collapsed state.
Finetuning Haystack through moderated usability testing
05
users
tested
02
task-flows
supervised
09
challenges
discovered
Navigating Project Categories
Moderated user testing of the Project Categories task flow revealed
Questions revealing lack of intuitiveness in the flow
Challenges, or places people got stuck in the process
Question
Project Dashboard Widget
50% of users questioned if the Progress Tracking widget on the Dashboard allowed them to act on their outstanding tasks
The widget was simplified to display tasks completed, and tasks started. Now there is also a link to view all notifications related to tasks they are involved in.
Challenge
Categories in a project
25% of users found the formatting of Categories confusing: the UI felt like a deviation from the design patterns that Tasks & Projects had begun to establish.
To maintain consistency, the formatting of a category was changed to resemble a half-way point between tasks and projects, and combined design elements from both to form it’s new format.
By being able to view your To-Do list wholistically, to being able to find tasks in a browser, Haystack is designed to make it as easy as possible to find what you need to do.
Projects & Categories
Projects are equipped with a number of features designed to quickly communicate responsibility & scope to users, and are divided into Categories filled with just the right people for the tasks at hand.
Tasks & Organization
Projects are equipped with a number of features designed to quickly communicate responsibility & scope to users, and are divided into Categories filled with just the right people for the tasks at hand.
Next Steps
Calibrating the desktop experience so planners can seamlessly track their tasks, no matter what device they are on is Phase 2 of Haystack’s development.
