From Concept to MVP

A General Manager of an arena is responsible for the financial success and overall operations of a venue. The GM needed an easy way in real-time to monitor if event sales are going well to keep on top of the financials. He is a person on-the-go, in and out of the building all day long, so getting pdf documents emailed was inconvenient and not timely.

event list imagefavorites list imagesummary imagetrends image
My Role
Lead UX Design
Lead Strategy & Research
Manage Jr. Designer
Collaborators
CTO
Product Manager
Account Manager
Engineers
UX Designers
Methods Used
Interviewing
Competitive Research
Persona Creation
Sketching/Ideation
Iterative Prototyping
Usability Testing

Product Strategy

Our high-level strategic goals were:

  • Create a new mobile app for an arena General Manager to get near real-time, high level reporting KPI’s
  • Assure that the sales data is reliable when compared to the database of record
  • Create a simple and easy-to-use app that requires minimal to no training
  • Initially developed for an iPhone with an Android version being created in a later phase
  • Release to a small group of users to get initial feedback for iterative improvements

Competitive Research

We studied the landscape of related apps, in particular in the FinTech sector, as well as apps from Ticketmaster and Eventbrite.

Understanding the Users

Our activities included:

  • Client interviews to understand their current event management processes
  • Interviews with users of the competitors product
  • Interviews with key members of the company internal staff
"I applaud you for looking at making an app like this. You will have significant growth opportunities for users like me who want information at different points of the event cycle."
design persona

After our interview sessions we were able to create a persona for an arena General Manager, who would be the target user for the first release. View PDF of persona write-up.

General Manager Persona image

Design Ideation

Once our team had a better understanding of the business context and competitors,  I organized a design ideation session with cross-functional stakeholders.  We sketched the first ideas that became input for our initial prototypes.

whiteboard with sketchesGroup sketching

From the many interesting sketches from the ideation session, we distilled the ideas with the Product Manager to decide on prototypes to test with customers.

Group sketchingwhiteboard with notes

Prototype Testing and Iteration

The first iteration was a grayscale version used to confirm the flow and features. This is the final prototype in InVision.

The screens below demonstrate how the design iterated and progressed for one of the screens.

Prototypes iterating

Project Challenges

Every project has a few bumps along the way and this one was no exception to that.

The CTO decided to put this project on pause two different times during the creating of the MVP version.

Along the way when the project was on pause, the developers and product managers changed, I was like the glue to hold it together, and was able to get them up to speed on our research, prototypes and goals.

Results after MVP

The first release of this new product offering was used by a small group of customers who provided valuable feedback for the subsequent iterations. The users were extremely happy and excited to finally have this product to help run their business.

I left the company before additional versions were created, but design and development did continue with a new team. This product is now live on the iOS and Android app stores for B2B customers to use. The current versions have additional features, all of which we had discovered during our research phase.

Paciolan published a press release when the app was available to a wider customer base.

press release image

Video of MVP Version

This video displays the first version of the app hosted in the company’s development environment using sample client data.