Designing the events platform for Dineout
I joined Dineout as a Product Designer back in May 2021. I was initially very nervous to join Dineout. However, I am glad that I was entrusted with the project of designing the events product for Dineout. I did some heavy weightlifting to prepare for this project.
Why Events on Dineout?
Events did exist on the platform before, but it was never treated as a product that was the centre of our focus. ‘Events’ as a platform became our focus point mainly for two reasons:
1. Acquisition of experience curating platform, SteppinOut a few months ago. SteppinOut is a company that organises events, both online and offline, all over India. It is well-known to host some famous events across the nation.
2. Opening up of public spaces and more people going out as compared to 2020. After being confined to our houses for nearly a year, all we want to do is go and out loosen up a bit. The pandemic has induced so much stress in our daily lives that we need an outlet to let this stress out. One great way is to attend events or engage in activities without friends and families.
What was the problem?
Events previously did exist on Dineout. But that came with a lot of problems. Firstly these events were only associated with a restaurant listed on the Dineout consumer app. This was not helpful for our growth in the long run and not a very sustainable way of solving problems of events on Dineout. Secondly, events did not have its own identity and a place on the app for users to look up.
Some issues of the earlier way of doing things are as follows:
- Low Discoverability of events- The discoverability of these events was low. The user had to go through hoops and loops to find these events. This was a trial and error method creating a bad user experience. The discoverability was only possible through the search bar and the restaurant detail page. But a question arises here: What will happen if events are not hosted by any restaurant listed on Dineout?
- Using restaurant detail page as events page- One very erroneous way of doing things was using the same page for both events and restaurants. Once the event was over (past its date) then there was a permanent event page created in a restaurant detail page format.
- Not very user-friendly- The event detail page did not follow any user interface design guidelines which made the page extremely alien on the platform. The content was not segregated properly and we found that there was an immense cognitive overload on the user. Finding the correct information on the page was very difficult.
How did we tackle it?
As with any redesign or product design project, it is good to become abreast of the existing issue and space that we are in. We decided to look at the existing data for events on Dineout and what the projections look like. This was followed by doing a thorough competitive analysis to understand what our competitors were up to.
We conducted an analysis of both direct and indirect competitors for this exercise. The idea was to understand product offerings, the way they list events, what all information is necessary when it comes to events, specifically. This gave us a very bird’s-eye view of the problem and how companies are tackling it.
We furthered the research by meeting one-on-one with some of our users to understand them. This helped us in validating some of our hypotheses whilst also giving us a fresh new perspective for doing things. For this exercise we met about 8–10 of our existing users. Our idea was to study our existing users more to create similar experiences for them within the application and making its adoption easier.
We asked the following broad questions to understand the users:
- What does you typical day look like? How do you like to socialise and wind down during the weekend?
- How often do you use Dineout?
- What do you like the most about Dineout?
- Describe an experience you remember the best while using dining out with Dineout?
- How often do you attend events?
- Have you ever booked event tickets through Dineout?
- What all apps do you usually use to book events?
- How do you go about your ticket booking process for an event? Describe from how you discover an event to how you finally book it?
- What are some of the things you look for before finalising a ticket to book?
- What is the one thing you think would interest you in booking events on Dineout?
These questions helped us in providing a good initial insight about user behaviour around booking tickets. This was shortly followed by a small exercise we asked the users to do:
Pull out your phone, share your screen and try to find an event you like on any of of our competitor apps.
This short exercise really helped us in understanding user behaviour in a more nuanced manner. Questioning the user’s pauses, likes and dislikes while browsing through the app was a great way of seeing how a user interacts in their natural setting.
Now what?
After gathering and analysing all the insights, we were confident in making a couple of user stories for the launch of first phase. These user stories acted as anchor points during the entire project. We observed these three overarching themes during our interactions with our users:
- Users don’t know a lot about Dineout events- Events occupied a fraction on the application. So naturally not a lot of users knew about them. But those who did know came to book through triggers like from notifications, social media campaigns, modals or banners on homepage.
- Users associate DO as a deal/offers hunting platform- The general behaviour of users that use Dineout is to find offers and deals on restaurants. So naturally, they want to associate that image with events on the platform too.
- Users are pretty used to the entire booking/reservation system within Dineout- The users are pretty comfortable with the current journey of booking tickets and entire Dineout ecosystem. This is a positive signal for us to not alter the experience and introduce a new product without changing user’s behaviour.
Some of the user stories hence identified after the research:
- As a Dineout Consumer, I should be able to easily browse all types of events (comedy shows, music shows, performances, etc) deals, coupons in one place.
- As a Dineout Consumer, I should be able to view a similar category of events say comedy shows, music shows, etc in separate individual sections for ease of comparison and selection.
- As a Dineout Consumer, I should be able to search for a particular event, venue, locality, event type, etc.
- As a Dineout Consumer, I should be able to filter events by date, type, restrictions, paid/free, etc.
- As a Dineout Consumer, I should be able to apply multiple filters together to narrow down the count of events for easier selection.
- As a Dineout Consumer, I should be able to choose between online vs offline events.
What the new journey of the user looks like?
This is a very no-brainer version of the new proposed journey of the user on the app when they want to book a ticket.
How did I start designing?
My first order of business was to nail down the event information card that we see on the homepage. Why? Because it is the first point of interaction of the user while booking ticket. This card should contain all the primary information that a user is looking for in a very concise manner. So, I did 20+ odd explorations for the event card.
After the event card was decided, I moved on the designing the key screens, i.e. the homepage, an events listing page and a detail page. Going back and forth with the team, I finally decided the look and feel of the new product and created the rest of the screens of the flow pertaining to those guidelines.
The final product, TADA!
A mobile landing page (I did more!)
I created a separate introductory landing page encasing and celebrating the birth of events (properly) on Dineout.
What did I learn?
Even though my problem statement was pretty straightforward, it did teach me a great deal about working in a team, taking in different perspectives and battling it out for my design decisions.
I’d like to thank…
I was lucky enough to work with a great team of designers, product managers and engineers. This was my first time interacting with the tech team and understand their point of view on things. I was constantly interacting closely with the leadership team for constant feedback on my work.
I’d like to thank Rituraj and Shrikant for guiding me throughout this project, Samikshya for helping me out with visual assets and to everyone from the engineering team for bringing our vision to fruition.
