Project overview

As a group we developed a modern event booking app centred around rebuilding user trust and empowering local volunteering opportunities. Our philosophy of transparency and prioritising people shaped Wonder's design both aesthetically and it's unique functions.

In the event booking industry user trust (of one another and the platform itself) is essential and a higher priority should be integrated into current applications. Moreover current app feel overly punitive with lots of negative punishments for cancellations and account bans – focusing on profit instead of people.

Challenge

Rebuilding user trust is difficult because it relies on both event hosts and attendees participating in a complex dynamic of uncertainty and expectations. On one side attendees have a difficult time committing to new events while hosts often experience bloated attendee listings. As users cancel last minute, because of this tension, those who do go are often left disappointed and feeling misled – blaming the app and the host.

As for volunteering opportunities, current solutions lack a cohesive, centralised network for volunteers to discover and compare local opportunities, meaning more time is spent on the admin and not the volunteering, which harms the user experience for everyone, but those especially with limited free time.

Action

We developed an app-culture that supports Wonder's users throughout their experience. Through anthropomorphic animal characters, similar to popular apps like Duolingo, that users engage with and are supported by. With a simple 'progression' system where users are rewarded for going to events.

To empower busy people to volunteer more often we reduced user friction by accumulating local volunteering opportunities and implementing a streamlined one-click application process with clear user feedback of their application progress. Achieved by integrating our reward system into user profiles which demonstrate the type of person they are, their achievements and their attendance records.

Insight

These integrated solutions were often not the first way of solving our personas root issues. However, they developed into their final form through 'restless reinvention' as described by IBM Enterprise Design Thinking certificate