SB Happy Hours
Recently I started working for myself, and I found it difficult to stay in touch with many of my work friends. I wasn't able to see those friends at the office anymore, and many of them have responsibilities at home which means they prefer to socialize early in the evening. This meant that we were often socializing during Happy Hours.
This lead me to realize the problem: there were no good resources for finding and choosing a place for happy hour in Santa Barbara.
This proved an ideal choice as my capstone project for my User Experience studies.
THE STORY
1. I started my process by studying similar websites and apps that focus on happy hours. I performed a Heuristic Analysis of the competitors to gain a better understanding of what they were offering.
Through my analysis of their strengths and weaknesses I gained knowledge of how my website could best benefit my users.
2. The next step was to organize my Research Plan so I can learn more about potential users and decide the best method for gaining good information. I decided on a screener survey followed by interviews.
3. My screener survey focused on finding those users who like to socialize and who use the internet to find places to eat and drink.
My next questions related to what the users look for in a happy hour and how they find them.
I posted the screener survey to several social media sites. I kept the language fun and relatable to spark interest in the survey to get as much data as possible.
4. User Interviews and empathy maps. I curated a list of 15 questions that I used to gain insight into who the users are and how they currently look for happy hours. After interviewing several people about their habits and interests, I chose two archetypes to base my empathy maps on. A "motivated" user who is actively socializing at happy hour time, and an "occasional" user who really uses happy hours as a means to an end.
5. Personas. The empathy maps helped me to understand my users needs and I was able to develop a pair of personas for Motivated Marisol and Occasional Owen.
6. Red Route User Flows. I identified red routes and completed user flows and sketches of pages.
