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Bringing a bar booking website idea to launch.
What would you do if you wanted to rent out a bar for a party?
Many bars in NYC have rooms or spaces that can be fully rented out for private parties. But there is currently no way to easily find, compare, or book these spaces.
That's where a startup based in New York called Barty comes in.
When did design get involved?
Barty was in the first year of its creation, meaning it was a three person team of developers living in New York. They needed a designer to take this idea and create a tangible experience.
At the beginnining stages, there was a general user flow but it lacked any traditional user insights or research that could be crucial for the success of a website idea like this.
Earliest UI mockup before I joined the project.
What was the first step in
the design process?
The first step for me in any design process is to gain a deep understanding of the problem.
This can mainly only be done through talking to people who have experienced that problem, so I interviewed a ton of New Yorkers who have tried to book bars in the past.
Interview insights infinity mapping excersize.
What pain points did you discover during the interviews?
There are 3 main pain points for anyone trying to book space in a bar for a private party.
1. Communicating with the bar
“Yeah, I feel like when I'm waiting on a reply, -I'm like please hurry up, or when I can't understand what they're saying so I have to email them back and forth like 100 times.
I'm like, come on, just be clear. I just can't understand what the point is, and can you please just answer my question?”
2. Confusion on space
“Yeah, there were challenges I was not 100% clear on what the room looked like. I got there and it was really small, I was like what the heck's going on? Basically I freaked out.”
3. Sense of trust in the bar & staff
“They're in complete control.
If I have a party scheduled for Saturday, right, they could call me Saturday morning and just be like, hey, not happening anymore, sorry, and they don't even have to give you a reason.
It's their bar.”
Journey mapping excersize to visualize user pain points.
How do you utilize these insights throughout the design process?
This is where personas come in. With all the insights and use cases gathered from interviews, I create a few personas then select one to use as reference throughout the remaining design journey.
Keeping the personas in mind, I can create a user scenerio, then a list of tasks that each persona would need to do in order to achieve their scenario goal, for example: book a sports bar.
Each scenario calls out all the details that inform the UI for the product, making designing much easier and more human centered.
Lastly I create task flows that reflect the choices each persona might encounter on their journey through the task list.
How did you address specific pain points within the user flow?
Brainstorming different design choices or features that will work against the pain point across different stages of the user journey is crucial to a design driven experience. For example, when someone books a bar, they need to wait for a confirmation message from the bar confirming the booking.
This design decision actually increases trust and confidence in the bar, a large pain point uncovered during interviews, since the booker knows the bar has personally accepted the request rather than it automatically booking.
Ultimately these decisions will be tested and validated through user testing to determine which have the greatest impact on eliminating pain points and improving the bar booking experience.
Barty website task flows based on James' user scenario.
What did some of the early wireframes look like?
At the beginning of wireframing, I aimed to gather all the important features and elements onto one screen based on each of the decision points in the task flow.
It was heavily discussed wether to focus on mobile or desktop screens first, but since the target user for Barty was Millennial and Gen-Z New Yorkers (known to be heavy cellphone users), mobile was initially prioritized.
Early Barty website wireframes.
How did the UI style evolve in the early stages of design?
The target user is the largest factor to determining the UI style and its importance for a new platform.
Since Barty targets young New Yorkers, the platform featuring a sleek, modern design that a user could consider "cool" was high in importance.
The UI visual design continued to evolve as the experience was improved, mainly being simplified by reducing use of strokes, and utilizing more white space.
Accessibility also drove many design changes as the fonts and colors became finalized through relenting rounds of feedback and testing with potential bar bookers.
Evolution of Barty UI visual design.
What was the final prototype like?
The final prototype followed the user scenario and task flows through the bar booking process.
The deliverable: high fidelity wireframes and a design system ready for Barty's dev team to implement, building a MVP of the site ready to pitch to bars.
design by Noah Ahrens © 2024
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