Research
Understanding and empathizing with wedding coordinators
During this initial phase of the project, we used a number of research methods to better understand our user group. We first conducted interviews with a variety of individuals in the wedding industry, allowing us to narrow our scope to wedding planners and coordinators. Based on these interviews we created provisional and polished personas which synthesized our research in a cohesive way. These were the basis of our user journey map, which allowed us to identify the pain points of wedding coordinators specifically, and informed our design requirements.
User Interviews
Overview
The first step in our user centered design process was to conduct semi-structured interviews with individuals in the wedding industry. We each interviewed a wedding planner (someone who plans the full wedding, start to finish) or a wedding coordinator (someone who executes the actual wedding), and also did some supplemental interviews with vendors and a bride. These interviews were crucial in helping us understand the wedding planning process and the different pain points experienced through that process. Once completing the interviews, we synthesized our research to inform our personas and user journey map.
Foundry Vendor Open House
Insights
Communicating with and keeping track of all parties included in a wedding is complicated and confusing.
Managing different wedding documents such as the seating chart, schedules, and contact information can be tedious.
This user is motivated by seeing the wedding come together after all the time and effort she put into the event.
Personas
Provisional Personas
After consolidating and organizing our user interviews, we shifted to developing personas. These provisional personas were archetypes of a wedding coordinator and a wedding planner, for they rested on the the goals, desires, and pain points of planners and coordinators we identified during the user interviews.
Creating Personas
Polished Personas
Once completing these provisional personas, we developed scenarios that were reflective of the experiences of a wedding coordinator and a wedding planner based on our user interviews. The provisional personas, along with the scenarios, were the backbone of our more polished personas for Madison and Julia.
Takeaways
The personas became reference points that we used throughout the design process to remember the wants and needs of our user group. By developing the personas, we also realized that a wedding coordinator and a wedding planner are distinct roles, and one solution cannot completely serve the needs of both groups in the scope of this project.
User Journey Map
Overview
The user interviews and personas provided the groundwork for the user journey map. We debated with whether to create a map for the full year leading up to the wedding, thus focusing on a wedding planner, or focusing on the week prior, thus focusing on a wedding coordinator. However, after factoring in our findings from the competitive analysis (see below), we decided to focus on a wedding coordinator. We designed our user journey map to encapsulate a coordinator’s thoughts and feelings for the week leading up to wedding and on the wedding day itself.
Competitive Analysis
Overview
In order to assess existing solutions our problem space, we conducted a competitive analysis in which we researched the functionality of the different solutions and analyzed their user reviews. This helped us get a sense of what features work well for wedding coordinators, and what features our solution could improve upon.
Pros & Cons
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Takeaways
After this analysis, we determined it was important to design simply yet maximize affordances and functionality within our solution. We steered our solution away from business and marketing aspects of the industry and decided to focus on a project-based platform. This, along with the user journey map, influenced the rescoping of our project. Because applications and websites for planning purposes is a saturated space, and are were not as many existing solutions for the execution of a wedding, we decided to adjust our target user from wedding planners to wedding coordinators.
Aisle Planner
Aisle Planner is used most by wedding planners to communicate, collaborate and manage wedding details such as budget, scheduling and set-up. This platform has three collections of tools, marketing tools, planning tools and listing tools.
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Pro: Lots of room for personalization
Con: Difficult to navigate
The Knot
The Knot has many features that engaged couples can utilize, such as the ability to build a wedding website, create a wedding registry, and search for dresses and suits for the couple and bridal party. In addition, the Knot also has a review forum and a marketplace for vendors and wedding planners to market their businesses.
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Pro: A variety of different relevant features for couples
Con: Unreliable reviews due to censoring and burying bad reviews
Documents
Documents by Readdle is designed to organize photos, videos, and music as well as text files and PDFs. Although Documents is not specific for wedding planning, it is a way to organize files and access them in a central location, which is ideal for wedding planners and day of coordinators.
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Pro: Files are easy to manipulate
Con: Takes a lot of storage, not tailored to wedding planners