Event planning for AzuKo
Creating a hybrid charity event
Project Background
Overview
Roles
UX Research
UX Design
UI Design with Figma
Team
Harold Prior-Palmer
Cecile Costerus
Zeb Cumberland
Timeline
January 23rd-27th 2023, 1 week design sprint
Client
Jo Asbridge, CEO Azuko
Company Background
Azuko is an architecture charity that works to alleviate poverty through sustainable development in disadvantaged communities in the UK and Bangladesh by improve living conditions.
Brief
Azuko is celebrating their 10 year anniversary later this year and Jo is keen to organise a special event for the occasion to celebrate with their team, partners, community members, volunteers and funders.
Jo envisages the event to be hybrid (both in person and people joining digitally) as their network is global. However she is worried about how feasible this is in reality and so would like us to provide insight on how to shape the best possible attendee experience for all.
Research
Research goal
To better understand the pain points of joining an event digitally and to discover what people find most important about an a charity event
Main questions asked:
Reasons you wouldn’t attend an online charity event
What they think would make a charity event engaging
What would encourage you to participate in an online charity
Most recent charity involvement and what they found was
41
respondents to online survey
20
in person interviews with people directly involved with Azuko
Affinity mapping
We grouped the key insights gained from our interviews and survey into themes to better understand the needs and reservations of attendees.
Main takeaways
There were a lot of concerns that it would be difficult to make the digital attendance as immersive an experience as in-person but it turns out some people don’t want to interact that much either because of family commitments or social anxiety.
There was also a lot of feedback that people felt joining on zoom for a charity event felt too much like lockdown or work and would take the fun out of it.
Those who do want the event to be as interactive as possible believe these are the crucial elements:
A good host
A good auction with prizes
Pledge-board
Opportunities to network
User personas
User Persona 1
Sarah’s persona reflects attendees who would prefer to attend the event online
Mixed feelings as to how interactive they want the online element of the event to be
User Persona 2
Viona reflects attendees who have directly benefitted from Azuko’s charitable work
Internet connection likely not to be good enough for zoom
User Persona 3
Ben’s persona reflects attendees like partners and funders who are most likely to attend in person but if they join online still want to able to bid/ donate easily and join in at the event.
Doesn’t want online element getting in the way of the flow of the in person event
Problem statement
Online attendees want flexibility with how much they interact with the online event whilst at the same in-person attendees do not want the online aspect to infringe upon the experience of how the in person experience is.
Hypothesis
Run the charity dinner in the traditional format. Then have the most important parts like the testimonials, speeches and auction live-streamed. Ensure that the digital aspect still includes plenty of opportunity to interact through networking, bidding etc but without ever in-fringing upon the in person experience.
Ideate and Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Landing page
Pledgeboard
We tried to make the virtual pledge-board as similar to the physical pledge-board as possible by having the drag and drop feature as well as being able to see other peoples pledges.
At first we envisaged digital attendees being able to pledge without the need to join the network but we realised this would be crucial with regards to Azuko following up on the pledge so we added it into the flow.
Auction and Livestream
We envisage the digital auction working by having a digital technician present at the in-person event raising their hand every-time a digital attendee places a bid.
Usability Testing
Overview
We conducted usability testing on our high-fidelity concepts and discovered users had problems with navigation. This was mainly due to the ‘website within a website’ structure we had originally gone for.
To solve this we designed it so that the navigation bar would only show the 10 year anniversary pages once the attendee had clicked ‘join the event.’
Original
Revised