BDW
Barcelona Design Week 2021
Overview
Year after year, creatives from all over the world gather on special dates to attend Design Fairs in different European cities. Since 2020 everything has been different and these spaces have adapted to the new reality, offering new opportunities to attend the event.
Barcelona Design Week has been the design reference in the city since 2006. As a design exercise, we redesigned the content of the portal using Information Architecture as a methodology.
Assignment:
“To design a platform that will give necessity to this new hybrid structure of the event, in which it is possible to participate both in person and virtual, considering it essential to have a satisfactory experience in both experience in both scenarios, and that also reflects the character of creativity and innovation that differentiates it from other events.”
BDW
Approach
We use the Information Architecture AI methodology to address the problem. Information Architecture helps people to understand where they are located and place themselves in their environment, as well as to find what they are looking for.
Along with IA we also use the User Centered Design approach UCD, which brings users to the center of the process. By making use of UCD we ensure that we take into account the needs, goals and expectations of the users.
The event organizers created a Design Briefing describing the problems to be solved, expectations and objectives of the festival. Along with the brief we also received Personas, which are a description of an archetypal user, which served as a guide throughout the design process.
The project was divided into three phases: modeling and requirements, definition and conceptualization.
Modeling and requirements
Based on the Design Brief, and Personas we created six Scenarios, with their corresponding User Journeys. Scenarios describe in a narrative way how the user uses a product and
User Journeys show step by step the user's interaction with the product. With this empathy exercise, you can imagine how the user interacts with the product. This allows you to find out what they think, what they feel, what concerns they have, what difficulties and barriers they face. In this way, problems are identified, possible solutions are thought of and opportunities for innovation are detected. The result is a list of project requirements.
Definition
The requirements were transformed into a content inventory, as its name suggests, is a proposal of the platform's content. Here we conducted a first test exercise with users, Card Sorting (Remote with Optimal Workshop). The participants organized the etiquettes with the information according to their logic, vocabulary and experience with similar events.
The objective of Card Sorting is to create a content tree, as close as possible to the
user's mental model.
Conceptualization
Based on the content tree, flowcharts were created. Here we revisited the User Journeys and Personas, to simulate the paths that users would take through the content structure.
A flowchart is a visual representation of the interaction between a user and the navigation proposal we have. It represents the steps users take to achieve a particular goal.
Sketching In this phase we start to materialize the ideas of the flowcharts. We start to imagine, to define interface elements and the actions behind them. They are drawings with pencil and paper, making notes, changes, all this in a way. We start to imagine the interaction between elements.
Low fidelity prototyping once the sketches of the screens were made, a prototype was built to represent the structure and interactions of the portal. The prototype was made with Figma, a digital prototyping tool.
Conclusions
The final result was a functional prototype for smartphone and tablet, ready to be tested with users. The prototype is the result of the Information Architecture process, using different methodologies for the creation of the platform's content, always keeping in mind the user's needs, desires and objectives. The next step would be to create or implement the design style of the platform.
Changes
In the conception part we were missing information about the technology and the way in which the interaction would be carried out in the exhibitions. So there were certainly issues to be clarified from the beginning.
I would create more scenarios or tasks to explore from the diagrams, so we would have a more detailed prototype of what we delivered.