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THE BRIEF
Improve retention & address user privacy concerns for the beta website of a social-planning calendar
THE SOLUTION
Website redesign focused on UI and navigation
View prototype
TIMELINE
2 weeks
MY ROLE
UI/UX designer
MY TEAM
Project manager, UX researcher
MY CONTRIBUTIONS: Heuristic analysis, user flows, sketching, wireframing, Figma prototype, usability testing, UX research support
THE PROCESS
DISCOVER
Stakeholder interviews
Heuristic evaluation
Usability testing
Competitive analysis
DEFINE
Research synthesis
Proto-personas
Journey map
DESIGN
Design studio
Sketching
Wireframing
Prototyping (Figma)
DELIVER
Usability testing
Client hand-off
THE CLIENT
The story behind Bizzy is simple: friends and loved ones need better tools to prioritize making plans together. Digital calendars are effective for organizing work priorities, but sending a Google calendar invite to a friend group for lunch can feel more cold than persuasive. That’s where Bizzy comes in – it’s a digital calendar and social networking app that makes social planning more personal and inspired. Users can create profiles, add their friends, access each other’s availability, and share event ideas.
CREATING AN EVENT (ORIGINAL WEBSITE)
USER PROFILE (ORIGINAL WEBSITE)
thE briEF
In 2022, Bizzy began adapting their iOS app into a website. They approached my team while the website was still in its beta stage, and presented us with three problem areas to explore:
1
Onboarding: the main priority was increasing retention, which Bizzy hoped to address through changes in the account registration flow for first-time users.
2
Privacy: customer feedback indicated that users were unsure about privacy settings on their profile, specifically about which aspects of their calendar other users had access to.
3
Social Features: a recently launched “Ideas” feature allowed users to post a to-do list of event ideas their social profile. Bizzy was interested in improving the feature to increase its rate of user interaction.
thE PLAN
With a timeline of 2 weeks, my team needed to narrow our scope. We got sign-off from our client to conduct user research & identify which of these problem areas we could most effectively address with the highest impact to the user and the business.
DISCOVER
HEURISTIC ANALYSIS
The beta status of the website meant that right away, we encountered a wide array of usability problems. These ranged from simple cosmetic issues, to general interface usability, to rather serious problems with primary user flows. Because some of these problems extended beyond the initial scope suggested by the client, our upcoming round of usability tests would be critical in helping us prioritize which of these issues to tackle.
But from my initial heuristic evaluation, the most notable usability problems included:
CALENDAR
FUNCTIONALITY
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basic interaction patterns didn't follow digital calendar conventions
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limited efficiency & productivity tools
NEW USER
INVITATION FLOWS
users could send event invitations to friends who didn't have an account. Those external users were presented with a variety of onboarding obstacles.
EVENT ATTENDEE
MANAGEMENT
hosts and attendees had the same set of attendee management tools, which caused confusion about event ownership
Navigation
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global navigation options weren't prominently presented in the interface
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unclear distinctions between primary and secondary navigation
COPYWRITING
important labels and CTAs lacked specificity and clarity, oftentimes due to an over-use of brand-specific terminology
Layout
unintuitive and crowded layouts contributed to clunky and inefficient interface experience
USABILITY TESTS
Next, our UX researcher conducted 5 moderated, remote usability tests with first-time users of the site. Our goal was to assess the current onboarding process, its impact on how users naturally navigated the website on their first visit, and how effectively they identified, understood, and accomplished basic tasks on their own. Here's what we learned:
1
HIGH FAILURE RATE FOR PRIMARY TASKS
After exploring the website on their own, test participants were asked to create an event and invite a friend – the majority of participants failed to complete both tasks. Navigation and UI impacted the discoverability of important features, and users struggled to understand the relationship between the social networking and calendar aspects of the website.
2
INVITING BUDDIES
Users first experienced uncertainty around privacy and visibility when attempting to invite a friend (or "buddy") to an event. 4/5 users abandoned the event creation task as a result.
unnecessary attendee management options are provided prematurely, raising questions about how friends can interact with your event
unclear terminology confuses users about what actions they are taking on this screen, and create more perceived decisions than the user actually has to make
3
VIEWING BUDDY'S AVAILABILITY
The second point at which users consistently encountered confusion around privacy & visibility came when accessing a friend's calendar. No users naturally gravitated towards the feature while navigating the site, and when prompted to do so, 4/5 struggled to interpret the availability being displayed.
DEFINE
SYNTHESIZING OUR RESEARCH
Now that we'd collected some data on our product and our users, our project manager compiled them into a proto-persona to root our problem-solving and design thinking into specific goals, behaviors, and pain points of a primary user. Our UX researcher also created a user journey map to visualize our findings.
DEFINING OUR PROBLEM
We had been asked to look into onboarding and privacy, but our research reframed these issues as symptoms of a broader lack of usability and learnability within the interface. Users weren't able to complete basic tasks of event creation and connecting with their friends within the website, which in turn raised doubts and confusion about the privacy of their profile and the visibility of their calendar details. We crafted a problem statement to center this new focus through the lens of our proto-persona:
Neda needs a deeper understanding of the tools available to her on Bizzy because she wants to utilize key features that Bizzy offers to help her organize events and stay social.
A TWO-PART SOLUTION
My team agreed that a redesign of the entire interface was the most high-impact solution to the user experience, and one which could be critical to implement during the beta phase of the website development. Although the client signed-off on our redesign proposal, we also felt it was important to deliver a separate, easier-to-implement solution in case the client didn't ultimately decide to adopt the redesign. As such, we got sign-off to create a new set of account registration screens that would work with either the current website or the proposed redesign.
PART 1: ACCOUNT REGISTRATION REDESIGN
A simple-to-implement solution that primes the user with brief but necessary context on the relationship between their account and their friend's accounts. .
Research showed that users were confused by the multiple entry-points into friend invitation on the current website design. Navigating the website on their own made it easy to miss an introduction to their own profile, which brought up questions about privacy and visibility when they encountered other profiles.
This solution would walk users through the task during account registration to prevent it from becoming a pain-point later on in their experience.
PART 2: FULL WEBSITE REDESIGN
This solution would make the interface more learnable and intuitive, prevent unnecessary confusion about privacy & visibility, and enable users to complete the primary tasks of event creation and friend invitation with fewer errors. The scope of the redesign would include:
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Navigation & IA redesign to make the website more predictable and learnable at a glance
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Copywriting audit to address vague terminology and correct inconsistencies between web and iOS experiences
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Simplified event creation user flow
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Simplified friend invitation user flow
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Redesign of "view friend's availability" user flow to improve learnability
DESIGN
PART 1: ACCOUNT REGISTRATION
I delegated the creation of our account registration screens to one of my teammates. I provided her with user flow of the three-step process for creating an account:
Using this flow, my teammate designed four high-fidelity registration wireframes:
Website Landing Page
Account Registration
Adding Buddies
Website Landing Page
1/4
PART 2: WEBSITE REDESIGN
DESIGN STUDIO
I started off my hosting a virtual design studio with our project manager and UX researcher. Since we only had a week to deliver the redesign, it was valuable for us to share ideas and explore many possible directions for some of our key screens.
SITEMAP ITERATIONS
To solve for the unintuitive navigation of the site, I stared by iterating on its sitemap & reconfiguring the information architecture. My goal was to highlight the primary functions of the Bizzy experience, make them easily discoverable, re-organize secondary features, and make the relationship between the website's social tools and productivity tools more self-evident to a first-time user.
ORIGINAL
REDESIGN
USER FLOWS
Although the redesign would practically affect every flow and feature on the site, I focused my user
flow iteration on buddy invitation during event creation. These was the most high-impact and consistent pain point in our first round of user testing, and required me to iterate on several options for event ownership and guest management models.
FIRST ITERATION
FINAL ITERATION
DELIVER
Prototype
HIGH-FIDELITY PROToTYPE
USABILITY TESTING
Together with our UX researcher, I conducted 5 moderated remote usability tests with first-time Bizzy users. These tests validated most of our design decisions, especially in regards to the primary tasks that users had failed to complete in the original website.
5/5 users successfully added a friend with no errors, and 5/5 users successfully located and interpreted their friend's availability. On the other hand, only 1/5 users understood the function of a newly-added calendar settings page. Our original usability tests suggested a strong need this set of features, so we recommend additional testing with specific focus on these features.
OUTCOMES
After reviewing our prototype and usability test findings, Bizzy fully implemented our design recommendations. The website is still in its unreleased Beta phase, but the original mobile app is available for download.
NEXT STEPS
While our team only worked on this project during a 2-week design sprint, we provided to the client with suggested next steps for future research and design work:
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Calendar Settings: to follow-up on the results of our usability tests, we recommend additional testing of a calendar settings page and further development of related features
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Calendar Availability: we recommend additional research on user goals, behaviors, and pain points around cataloguing, sharing, and viewing their friend's availability. In our competitive analysis of similar features in related products, we found that viewable availability is typically designed for users sharing their professional availability. But how might users want to utilize and optimize this tool in a social networking context?
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Google Integrations: when we were brought on board, Bizzy was already working on incorporating Google Sign-In for users creating new accounts, as well adding Google Calendar integrations so that users can sync their calendars across platforms. Our competitive analysis found that these features could add critical improvements to the user experience. Once these features are implemented, we recommend iterated testing to optimize the added benefits of the integrations.
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