Burning Man
Curated Event Microsite — Case Study
Live events have existed for as long as humans have been communicating. For this week’s project, the brief challenged us to create a micro-website for one event of our choice, from festivals to exhibitions or fairs. Nowadays an event’s digital presence is as important as the event itself — it represents the more lasting testimonial of what happened during those days.
Overview
Some cultural organizations have already developed an engaged relationship and dialogue with their audiences, however, what will make the difference for companies is the consideration they will have for technology’s effect on people and the spaces they inhabit.
We’ve chosen the Burning Man to build an easy to navigate and engaging micro-website for next year event. Burning Man is an event held annually since 1986 in the Black Rock Desert of northwest Nevada. It’s an experiment in community and art and includes artistic performances, installations, music, and of course, a lot of partying.
Challenge
- Design a ready-to-build website for a festival of your choice, that will take place next year, to make the arts widely accessible
Teamwork makes the dreamwork
Duration: 4 days + presentation
My role:
- Desk research
- Conduct tests
- Atomic Design
- Branding
- High-Fidelity prototype design
The protagonist
Meet Tim!
Tim is a 26-year-old firefighter whose friends have decided to go to Burning Man next year. He is interested in joining them, but doesn’t know a lot about the event, so he needs to make sure he gets all the information he can and feel excited to go.
Desktop Research
We kicked off by putting ourselves on the user’s shoes and creating a current User Journey. We explored the actual website of the event trying to get relevant information for someone that is going to the event for the first time and haven’t heard much about it.
The current website of Burning Man is like a whole universe of information hidden inside different menus and even on external pages. It is quite confusing, hardly navigated and it seems hard to find the information that you look for.
User research
Interviewing some users and also reading some trend reports, these were my insights:
- Nowadays people want greater interaction and dialogue in all walks of life
- Users are no longer willing to be passive spectators anymore when it comes to the arts
- There is an increasing hunger for dialogue, debate, and interaction.
- Like all digital innovations, the adoption of virtual interaction by festivalgoers continues to rise.
- A well-promoted, user-friendly website that provides critical information and planning is a must.
Benchmarking
To understand the market and gather inspiration, we’ve done a Benchmarking focusing on the visual aspects of four big music events: Tomorrow Land, Boom Festival, Coachella, and Universo Paralello.
All the festivals use strong colors and pictures to mark their aesthetic. But other than this, they all have poor simple design innovation.
Market Positioning Chart
We put the competitors on this market positioning map,
with Coachella and Tomorrowland being more individual and innovative; Boom Festival and Universo Paralello focusing more on the community and being more traditional.
Here’s the desired position we want to place Burning Man micro-site:
Define step
At this stage, we had to start defining the visual identity of our micro-website.
Branding
We wanted the new website to reflect Burning Man’s already existing personality and core values, but more understandably and appealingly with soft sandy colors and breathtaking pictures that reflects the main traits of the event including: inclusive, free-spirited, expressive, radical, spiritual and sustainable.
We also put it on this Brand Opposites, and you can see that the festival is: friendly, young, playful, and directed towards the greater mass.
Ideation step
We’ve started the ideation part by structuring the information in our pre-event and during-event micro-websites.
Site Map
And then, our User Flows:
The first User Flow goes from entering the First Timer’s Guide, until getting connect with A Local — an experienced visitor — a new feature that reflects Burning Man’s sense of community.
For this second flow, we want to show the user’s universe inside the website. Here, the user has a dashboard with everything he needs until he gets more involved with the community. The flow goes from logging, then adding an event to your tailored schedule, until getting directions to an event.
Prototype
After that, we created lo-fidelity prototypes for both pre-event and during-event –desktop and mobile. We tested them, which showed that our user flow worked well, but we still had to make a few adjustments before going to midi-fidelity prototypes.
Here, you can see some of the main iterations and changes we’ve done until the desired high-fidelity prototypes.
- In the First Timer’s Guide page, which was from this basic list of information to this more playful layout.
- In the during event dashboard, we created a feature where users can tailor their schedules. Things went from this simple and not very intuitive page where users missed some information to this one where information and feedbacks are more clear. And it is also a more appealing one.
In the mobile version, we had some trouble with the menu, since there are two, people got confused with which one does what. But after a lot of testing and iteration, we ended up with this solution. You can see there is a main menu on the left, and a personal one on the right.
And here’s the pre-event desktop and during -event mobile high-fidelity versions:
Key Learnings and Surprises
For my conclusion, I’m gonna highlight the amazing experience that was working with again with Amanda Norell and Joana Martins💕. The whole process was smooth and enriching in many, many ways. Working remotely and collaboration in distancing was a little tricky this time due to some problems with Adobe XD (it had a crash with server and we couldn’t collaborate in real-time). But we turn it around and found a way of working well 😊.
My main learning from this week was that: documentation is the rule! Keeping all stages of your process very well documented helps a lot with the overview and iteration process.
