Overview
In January 2023, a team of Cal Poly students and I banded together to compete in UX Fest SLO's annual UX design competition. We were tasked with redesigning a website or mobile application for one of San Luis Obispo's amazing local businesses. For our project, we chose to redesign the website for the Palm Theatre, an independent theatre located in Downtown SLO. For most of the team, this was our first time competing in UX Fest SLO and we were nervous competing but we surprised ourselves and came out as one of the six finalists!
Project Details
Timeframe: 36 hours | Winter 2023
Team: Katrina Lin, Christine Ha, Justin Lau (Team Jelly Kid)
Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator
Design Brief
Having an online presence can be a crucial tool for businesses to improve customer retention and boost visibility. With this in mind, your challenge is to design a mobile application or web experience for a SLO local business of your choice. Your prototype may be a redesign of the business's existing application OR create an original application if there is no existing application. Your prototype should be an original, creative, accessible application that takes customer needs into account while streamlining the business's services.
Existing Website Pain Points
Our team's SLO local business of choice was the Palm Theatre in Downtown SLO. While browsing the existing website, we felt that the branding could be more inclusive toward the AAPI community. Other key pain points we wanted to address included:
• Limited functionality
•. Poor user experience
• Inconsistencies between pages
• Contact page lacks accessibility
User Interviews
We conducted a series of user interviews to learn about the experiences that customers have had with the business/website and to gain a greater understanding of key points we should focus on in our solution. These are some quotes that stood out to us from our interviews.
⎜“Why should I go here if I can go to another theater?”
⎜“I don't like having to click around to find out what everything is... I'm confused”
⎜“It doesn't feel like a theater.. doesn't feel personal”
User Personas
Based on our user interviews, we created two user personas that represented Palm Theatre's target audience.
Problem Statement
How might we create a more inclusive and interactive website that accurately reflects the company's modern image and stimulates consumer interest?
Ideation
With our research completed, the four of us created our mood boards showcasing our rebranding goals. We then gathered our favorites of each mood board and combined them into one.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
For our low/mid-fidelity wireframes, we created the following in Figma:
• A carousel of upcoming movies for the week
• A contact form for users to ask questions or leave inquiries
• A dark mode/light mode button for enhanced readability
High Fidelity Prototype
Design System
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Since this was our first time competing in the UX Fest SLO competition as a team, we faced many challenges throughout the 36 hours we were given. With these challenges, I also learned many valuable lessons from working on this project.
Awareness
One piece of feedback we received from the judges was to highlight what would influence users to visit the Palm Theatre website.
Test, test, test!
Conducting user testing is super important to creating human-centered designs. To gain a better understanding of the website's target audience, we could have sent out a survey asking questions about the website. After creating our high-fidelity prototype, our team could have also conducted usability testing, specifically A/B testing.
Have fun!
While this was a competition, my team and I had a blast working together and getting to know each other.
What's next?
Moving forward, I would love to go back and revisit this design as a solo project. With more time, I believe that it would be interesting to include short clips of the trailers for the upcoming movies to entice customers. I would also love to reorganize the layout of the site and enhance the amount of white space used throughout each page.
