I wanted to share a few bits I’ve been working on for my Comedy Discovery project (which really needs a name, by the way).
User Flows
I already made some User Goal based Task Flows a couple of weeks ago, but these User Flows are more process based and helped me think through a couple of things.
User Flow – Finding gigs to go to
Drawing right on my whiteboard means it’s easy to scrub stuff out and redo it. In this flow I’m highlighting how logged in users get personalised recommendations – but users without an account can still search through the gigs available.
I also made some super simple happy path flows…
Happy Path
These are additional to the path above, and would be a really easy way for users with accounts to get recommended gigs, based on their preferences and previous likes.
This next flow is for finding new acts…
User Flow – Discovering Acts
I like how this ended up, showing that it’s a reiterative process – repetitive and ongoing. There’s no “end”. Users can continuously be discovering new acts and telling the site whether they like that act. The site keeps learning about the user’s preferences and updating recommendations.
Navigation
I’ve been thinking about my menu structure, but I also did a brainstorm about ideas for alternative navigation features…
Navigation Ideas
Some of the stuff going on in this brainstorm:
Trending Feed
This would promote gigs and acts based on various metrics like recommendation, popularity, selling out, and a curated “act/gig of the week”
Search – Tags / Categorisation / Badges
I will be relying heavily on tagging and keywording rather than categorisation. It doesn’t make sense to have users dial down through menus to find acts in something like Observational > Political > Leftist, for example. Categorising acts like this would fall apart really quickly.
Instead, acts can just be tagged with “observational”, “political”, “leftists” and then users can search for those things. This will also make it easy for acts to be related to each other, for recommendation purposes.
I could also offer a “tag cloud” of popular tags, which users could just click on to see comedians with that tag.
This will also enable me to tag really specific things, for example venues and gigs can be tagged with “comfy seats” or “friendly hosts” as uncomfortable seating and aggressive hosting style were things that came up in my initial user research.
In some situations, these specific tags could be turned into visible “badges” on that act or gig’s profile page. These could be things like “up and coming” for acts or “gender equal” for gigs.
