BlogTO App

Setting

BlogTO is a website that source Toronto's local news and culture, restaurant reviews, event listings and the best of the city. I've always been a fan of BlogTO and have always wanted a site that is very local and catered to people who are adventurous and want to experience Toronto rather it’s through food or events.

Challenge

After using the current event page, I've noticed a couple of issues:

  • • Users are provided with very limited search options.
  • • No filters available, as a result lacks the personalization for specific users (i.e. kids content, concerts only fanatics)
  • • A lot of scrolling and clicking in order to get to the actual content, making it seems like a long process
  • • Navigation is hidden, making it less engaging for users to click and select
  • • Search bar is not visually eye-catching, which can be seen as hidden

Goal & Deliverables

To improve the overall user experience and reduce the cognitive effort, we have:

  • • New navigation menu that allows user to access important information quicker
  • • A dedicated search section that have filtering and recommended categories that meets different users' needs
  • • New search bar is now always visible to the user making it more easily accessible
  • • Search will continue to collect data to match user's interest, thus increase engagement

Process

Researching and understanding the current app's user flow and functionality is necessary to help us picture what the problem is. In addition, competitive analysis will help us understand how other companies apply certain design patterns. After the research phase, ideation and sketching is the next step. When designing, applying some of the best practises and UX principles is important to create a human-centric experience.

  • Image Slider Image
  • Image Slider Image

Solution

User flow and wireframes

Once the user flow has been defined, sketching out wireframes is the next step. Often during this step I would ask for feedback, gather information if the experience is cohesive before moving on to high fidelity prototyping.

User Flow
User Flow
User Flow

Learnings

Accessibility

Accessibility has been a huge concern and throughout the years, I've also learned a lot. In the future, I hope to test this through a screen reader and understand what areas I can improve on making it AA accessible.



Get feedback from wider audience

Testing on different users are critical, however because this was a fun project I tested on users that are around my age, such as my friends. In the future I hope to test it with wider range of audience. To really understand how I can improve and cater to different ages, demographics, and backgrounds.