Dovetail

Scenario Walkthrough

DoveTail in action

Dovetail is a tool designed to help event planners avoid conflicts by enabling them to indicate when their event will take place. By leveraging the use of a shared platform, event planners will be able to inform the New Economy community about upcoming events with minimal cost and effort.

As tech lead for this project, I created the high-fidelity functional prototype in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Live Prototype

Research Process

Research Methodology

To gain an understanding of the domain space, we conducted a literature review in tandem with interviews and a competitive analysis to map out related platforms for event planning and marketing such as EventBrite, Google Calendar, and Facebook.

Understanding the Domain

For our comprehensive literature review, we read papers about the Sharing Economy, Motivations for Participation, Relationship Marketing, and a myriad of other topics. However, one topic we were surprised not to find any research on was Nonprofit Event Planning, the focus of our project. We hypothesized that because there was scant interest in this particular area, there was no funding to conduct research.

Interviewing the Target Audience

We also conducted 11 interviews with non-profit event planners and attendees ranging in age, tech savviness, experience, and connections. The type of questions we asked centered around their backgrounds, technology, event planning, skills, and personal involvement.

Understanding Existing Tools

For our competitive analysis, we looked at tools and methods used by event planners to disseminate new events they are planning. We measured each tool or method by impact, ease of use, and reach.

Findings & Insights

After interpreting and synthesizing our data, we found 3 key insights from our findings:

Event conflicts are common and attendees are resigned to it. Therefore, we must educate and empower event planners to challenge the status quo.
Social influences drive event participation, so our solution needs to add more social components to event marketing.
Nuanced marketing with integrity is necessary for maximum impact, so we must design a solution that tailors messaging with ease.

Visioning & Storyboarding

Based on these insights, in order to define our solutions, we held a visioning session with our client. During this session, we agreed to focus on the amateur, tech-savvy event planners, instead of the more well-established, experienced event planners. In this way, our solution could have maximum impact for the target audience. Afterwards, we brainstormed four solutions that we drew out as storyboards.

Persona Development

We developed a persona in order to help focus our design. We chose to create an amateur event planner who struggled with getting her event noticed without much funding. This will allow us to build a tool that could encompass a wider range of event planners.

Prototyping Process

For each iteration, we tested with event planners through think-aloud testing methods. We moved to high-fidelity prototyping in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
prototyping-2