Paper & Pen, Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Marvel, Key note, Trello, Slack.
14 Days
Adspur is a startup founded in 2013 and based in London who are aiming to build a calendar for the industry of award shows around the world.
Try to clearly layout multiple date types in the calendar when a user can follow over 30-40 different competitions, as well as adding clear "tool-tip" style information about each date event.
Adspur have a real competitive advantage being the only award calendar in the industry gathering key information about hundreds of award shows around the world. Their goal is to keep that advantage making it clearer and easier to use.
As a starting point we completed a business analysis, to fully understand Adspur’s key features. We needed to identified their competitors, where they stood in the market, what could we learn from them and looked at what exactly differentiated them against Adspur’s service. The clear gap in our analysis demonstrated that none of Adspur’s main competitors were currently offering a calendar feature but they did meet basic functions of providing detailed information about awards through search or lists but this meant a lot of manual labour for the user.
We needed to get a real understanding of how current users were utilising the platform but also identify new and potential users. Through an online survey, face to face interviews and task analysis’ we gained a lot of useful insights into user types, how they planned award schedules, what tools they were using and what pain points they were currently facing. Our main target audience proved from our survey to be creatives working within the advertising sector.
Here are our some of our key survey insights:
76% of participants selected accurate information as the most important factor when following award competitions — they needed to know information was reliable and trustworthy.
44% of participants did not use any online tools to keep track of the awards industry — a big percentage validating the current gap in the market for a tool like Adspur.
During our interview phase we followed up with various of our survey participants that consisted of Award Managers, Creative Directors, Copy writers, Marketing Assistants, Designers and Art Directors. Every interview proved very useful and a chance to dive in further drawing out behaviours and patterns for our research synthesis.
Here are some key quotes from our interviews:
“The calendar needs to be intuitive, something familiar so I don’t have to re-learn how to use it” — Creative Director (Advertising Agency)
“When I look at my calendar, the most important thing is to find information quickly” — Marketing Assistant (Design Agency)
We also wanted to expand on some of the answer from our survey focusing on the reason why 44% of our survey participants weren’t using any online tools to track awards.
We found really intriguing that our participants weren’t currently using any online tool because their needs were simply met by paper & pen. Some of them even mentioning they kept an agenda purely because it was quick an easy to keep track of dates.
What all of our participants had in common was that they all kept an excel spreadsheet to keep track of their awards data and some simply used their personal calendar to keep track of event schedules. All of these were insights that influenced our design showing what elements were important to our users like being able to save time, reliability, useful notifications and sharing/collaborating with others.
As the next step we collected all our insights with an affinity map and began to develop our personas as they would be the representatives of our chosen specific user group type throughout our designs.
We developed 3 personas but decided to focus on Enrica Marro as she represented the frequent user group type that would use Adspur on a regular basis. From our research we focused on establishing key pain points and needs iterating to remove any assumptions.
With all of our research in place we began sketching some initial ideas and held a design studio with members of the Adspur team to make sure our solutions were inline with their goals and vision.
The main purpose of the design studio was to sketch some initial ideas together, critique and arrive at some solid design solutions at the end of the process. We generated a lot of great ideas and potential features so we also carried out a feature exercise with the team to narrow down the scope and prioritise.
As our next steps, we wanted to test our designs early so we built a paper prototype which was very easy and cost effective. We gained some great initial feedback and implemented some changes early on.
In total we carried out two rounds of usability testing and moved into digital wireframes to iterate on our designs. From our research we found that users didn’t have a lot of time to plan their awards calendar and often used multiple systems with an urgency to access information quickly. We wanted to focus on this area through out our testing phase as we wanted to make it as easy as possible for our users to access the information they needed using conventions that were familiar so they didn’t have to re-learn a new system completely.
From further testing we found that the current flow was still very complex and users didn’t know where to begin their journey. One of the main features we to introduced was a Dashboard that would enable users to keep track of their schedules providing them an overview of upcoming awards and notifications. We also wanted to improve the flow of the calendar as we found that there were too many options and there was no interaction between each event and the corresponding date views.
Editing with Sketch
The result was an innovative high fidelity design that reflected Adspur’s brand carrying a premium feel focusing on trust and reliability.
Overall as a result of the research and testing we met Adspur’s goals by re-designing the calendar to be more interactive, engaging and improved some of the core features focusing on usability.If we look back at Enrica’s needs, we have put her right at the heart of the design and solved her pain points by making her job much easier reducing her workload and allowing her to plan more efficiently but ultimately to create a positive impact at her company enabling them to have a bigger chance to win awards.
As next steps, we would like to make sure to include some additional features that would be added in future releases from our analysis:
Include sync or calendar integration so users can update their personal calendar seamlessly.
Split some of the new functionalities to be accessible not just for pro accounts but basic also increasing user engagement.
Create tablet and mobile versions making our design responsive as some of our users accessed the platform on the go!
Improve and extend the functionalities in the dashboard giving to the user more custom options and tailor their Adspur experience.
Thanks for reading