Manchester International Festival

LUOMUS

The Finnish Natural History Museum

LUOMUS

The Finnish Natural History Museum

LUOMUS

The Finnish Natural History Museum

UX/UI Design | Brand Identity | Logo Design | Illustration | Promotional Activity

Shillington College of Graphic design Concept Project

MANCHESTER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

UX/UI Design | Brand Identity | Logo Design | Illustration | Promotional Activity

Shillington College of Graphic design Concept Project

INTRODUCTION

The brief

Manchester International Festival is the worldʼs first festival of original, new work
and special events and takes place biannually in Manchester, UK. With huge
names from arts and entertainment world and exclusive first looks at brand new
works this is heaven for arts & culture lovers.

In 2007 the festival launched as an artist-led, commissioning festival presenting new works from across the spectrum of performing arts, visual arts and popular culture.
The festival is held over 18 days festival that debuts in Manchester before touring cultural hubs such as New York, Ruhrtriennale Germany, Madrid, ArtBasel and more.
The festival has featured huge cultural icons like Damon Albarn, Bjork, Steve McQueen, Kenneth Branagh & Willem Defoe, Al Weiwei & Yoko Ono.
It's a prime opportunity to experience never before seen works by some of the worlds finest artists.

An app for the Manchester International Festival
The visuals you create could later be rolled out into a series of promotional
collateral for the event

Requirements

Objective

To raise the profile of the event and create excitement surrounding it
To point people towards booking tickets

Kickoff

In this project, I took a user-centred design approach that proved to be effective and easy to understand in my design efforts. I found the qualitative research method to be appropriate and the most useful. It consists of foundational research, competitive analysis, and persona creation. I started by asking some initial key questions:

What is the product and who is it for?

Who are the primary users?

What do the primary users looking for?

Who are the biggest competitors?

What sources should I review to familiarise myself

These questions act as a starting point to understand the overall context and situation and allow me to proceed to the next step.

The Challenge

The Manchester International Festival needs to be a design that should represent the excitement and opportunity to experience these events rather than the city of Manchester itself. The festival is compromised of a range of various events. The design should not focus on any one event over the others.

The Solution

A UI/UX design that uses clear information architecture, content hierarchy and clear use of alignment and graphic elements. An app which allows users to explore and find the information they are looking for with ease, as well as, a series of promotional collateral for the event.

Discovery

Research Plan

I began by creating a research plan, to align our goals and map out how to get a deep understanding of the users’ behaviours, needs and goals but also why they would want to attend the festival. My main goals were to understand:

Why users weren’t attending the festival and their main blockers
What motivates users to attend the festival and what they get out of going
What primary information they are looking for and what should be dispayed

Competitive analysis

I audited industry competitors to understand how the existing festival apps are constructed. Several aspects that I reviewed are audience, first impression, user interaction, visual design and contents.

I first analysed the Sounds of The City festival, to get an in-depth understanding of what user currently experience when attending a festival. This also gave me a feel for their existing UI and brand voice.

From here, I did some initial competitive analysis to understand what other festivals in Manchester were offering. I looked at the Wigan International Jazz Festival and the Bluedot Festival as they are prominent festivals in Manchester.

Some features that stood out were the minimalistic interface, short and to the point descriptions, easily accessible content, and coherent branding.

Competitive analysis was a tool I used throughout the design process and came back too often. I found referring back to our competitors’ apps, promotional collateral, features, wording and flows incredibly insightful for inspiring what I did and didn’t want to achieve and include in our solution further down the line.

User Interviews

With the research plan and initial competitive analysis complete, we started interviewing. We established the participant criteria as users who want to attend festivals. We interviewed 9 users who fit the participant criteria, focusing our questions on:

How users book and find festivals
Users’ emotional responses to attending festivals
What users think a positive festival experience is
Users’ motivations for attending festivals

Key Insights

These key insights fit into 3 main trends:

The fear of the unknown, which often stops users from attending all possible events at the festival, instead, users want to know what's on, information about the event and details of the venue and content.
Users prefer when the festival has many different events happening
Users feel more comfortable in an all inclusive, relaxed and informal setting.

Reviewing the insights gathered so far highlighted that the focus going forward would be on users feeling prepared and knowing what to expect at festivals, as this encompasses users’ key pain points. Therefore, this is the problem that we focused on solving as we moved through the rest of the design sprint.

Define

Persona

Using these insights, I discovered the persona. Joseph is a 28 year old creative director living in London, UK. He loves spending time with people from all kinds backgrounds and cultures, so he can learn something new. He likes attending different festivals, in order to experience something never seen before. He wants to be entertained by different cultural events.

Problem Statement and How Might We Statement

With Joseph’s needs, goals and pain points clear, I workshopped and iterated on multiple problem statements to come up with the final statement to guide our design decisions moving forward and ensure that both the designers and stakeholders were united on the problem, its significance and who it was impacting. We also came up with a How Might We statement, as a starting point to begin exploring potential solutions and ideas to solve the problem:

Problem Statement:

Joseph needs a way to enjoy all aspects about the Festival he is attending, because he needs to make sure he will have assess to all the information, so that he can enjoy a new experience.

How Might We Statement:

How might we create a brand concept that is all inclusive for the individual
who is curious about cultural events, so that they can have an entertaining festival experience.

Develop

Design Studio

I then ran a design studio, where I had 6 minutes to sketch some ideas for solutions, which would be presented back to peers and vote on which to iterate on

Iterating on these solutions after the workshop provided a key learning for me as I realised that moving through new ideas was a more efficient problem-solving technique than defending solutions that only some of my peers were backing. In order to come to a valuable solution, I continued iterating and the more ideas I put forward, the better they became.

User Flow

I constructed a user flow for the persona from start to finish as they might have different journeys. This helped me in understanding the ways the user might interact with the product, as well as allowing me to see navigation through user goals. The user flow will predict how my persona might carry out the task.

Mid-Fidelity & UX Writing

After collating and refining our final ideas, we turned our low-fi sketches into mid-fidelity wireframes.

User Testing

We then conducted semi-guided, moderated tests with 5 users matching the persona to test the usability and desirability of the content in the mid-fidelity wireframes.

Overall, the feedback from testing was positive and users suggested they’d like to explore the features further. There were some usability changes to make, e.g. adding categories to the nav bar, changing some of the content and restructuring the home page.

UI Design

After making some final changes, it was time to finalise the UI elements and move on to high-fidelity. I decided to give the website a different identity, using different colours and graphic elements.

Deliver

High-Fidelity Prototype & Solution

To round off the project, we presented the final prototype to peers, taking them through our findings and how we got to the final designs.

Promotional Activity

Luomus: Museum of Natural History

Homepage Redesign

B-Line

App Design