Davis After Dark — A UX Case Study

Design Interactive
12 min readJul 1, 2024

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Introduction

Davis After Dark simplifies the discovery of nightlife events in Davis. Our team worked on this project for six weeks from April to June of 2024. Our prompt was, “Due to a lack of centralized and up-to-date information, students, residents, and visitors often remain unaware of all the social events and opportunities that Davis has to offer after dark.” During this sprint, we designed an app that makes nightlife events easy to find while allowing users to personalize their event recommendations based on their unique interests.

Awarded: Audience Choice

Responsibilities and Timeline

Here was the general timeline for our 6-week sprint and our leads for each week:

Week 1: User Research — Agnes Aragones

Week 2: Synthesis and Ideation — Kristin Ly

Week 3: Mid-fi Prototyping + Usability Testing pt.1 — Daphne Tran

Week 4: Mid-fi Prototyping + Usability Testing pt.2 — Kano Castleberry

Week 5: Hi-fi Prototyping — Agnes Aragones

Week 6: Final Presentation — Kano Castleberry

Research

For our research we started off by doing a Literature Review and Competitive Analysis of other apps and methods of how parties and other events were promoted. From that point we made a survey with questions to find out what people define “nightlife” in Davis as, along with how they feel about the nightlife here.

Our main Research Goals were

  1. Finding out what people consider “nightlife”
  2. How they feel about Nightlife in Davis
  3. How they find out about the events happening

From that survey we got 61 responses ranging from ages 18–60. We found out that most of them found out about events happening through their friends, word of mouth and social media and that 88% of our respondents actually consider getting dinner as a “night out”.

This shocked us because we thought that we were expecting more people to go out to bars/clubs or frat parties, but only about 20% prefer bigger parties and social spaces. We realized that the Davis demographic is a lot more laid back and intimate than we expected, so we wanted to expand more on this part of the research. Other problems that we found out from the surveys was about safety, transportation and event compatibility. We also found out that 54% of the respondents rate the nightlife scene a 3/5 and that 87% prefer spending time with existing friends.

After, we conducted User Interviews with people from different demographics and personality types to gain more insight. We interviewed alumni who were more familiar with smaller kickbacks with close friends, along with College students who just turned 18 and are more extroverted. We had prepared questions depending on whether they were a big party goer, or preferred a more chilled kickback setting.

From those interviews, they said that they wanted our app to be more personalized, along with finding out who is going to these events so that they can find more friends/communities, and also discussed pain points with how another party app called “Poppin” is like, since we also found out that students in Davis have been using it recently.

Ideation

After we received our survey results, we identified our user pain points through affinity mapping by creating tags to help us narrow down the main problem. We categorized the survey responses and found that the main frustration shared among users was the poor advertisement of events in Davis. We also realized that many individuals have unique interests and preferences for nightlife and sometimes struggle to find people to attend events with. One surprising finding was that more users preferred dinners over parties for their ideal night out. Altogether, we came to the consensus that there was poor centralization for finding events, a lack of personalization for discovering specific events, and a need for social connection.

We then refined our focus with a problem statement:

How might we effectively promote nightlife events to the Davis community while also simplifying the process of discovering these events?

Next, we created two user personas to help us better understand our target audience. We decided on two personas because we noticed that our survey participants were fairly split between being introverts or extroverts.

One user is a transfer student, Nara, who lives out-of-state and enjoys casual events. However, she wants to explore bigger parties and meet more people. The other user is a party host named Michael who is from the city and prefers bigger parties. He’s in greek life and wants to be a DJ but gets overwhelmed with the expectation of inviting his friends to known parties.

We kept these different users in mind for awareness of the various needs and personalities of our users throughout our process.

Our next steps were to brainstorm potential solutions, which we showcased in our lo-fi sketches. Since the main issue for users was to find events, we decided that the home page should streamline events with a ‘For You’ and ‘Explore’ page. There would also be filters to toggle between present and upcoming events since users felt that they often learned about events too late. We also thought of a profile page to display all of the user’s saved events in one place.

To help cater to individual preferences, we came up with a tag system that filters events into category filters to make it easier for people to find their desired outings. There would also be an onboarding quiz to specify a user’s interests and personality, which would be calculated into their ‘For You’ page algorithm.

Lastly, we thought social interaction could be improved by a chat messaging feature and with the addition of public personality tags that would be displayed on a user’s profile after taking the onboarding quiz. This way, users can identify others of similar interests.

Mid-fi Prototyping

After going through all of our lo-fi solution sketches, we were able to go through a few iterations before finalizing which features we wanted to take into mid-fi. We landed on five main pages, which included our onboarding, homepage, event page, the chat, and the profile page.

Our team also considered which task flows would showcase our most important features. The first task flow we prototyped was the onboarding process. This includes a quiz that allows the user greater personalization over their feed results upon entering the app. The second task is to save a dinner event beginning at the homepage. This particular task demonstrates our multi-filter system that allows our user more control over their experience on the app, as well as introducing the event saving feature. Our final task flow involves adding/removing tags from the profile page. This task will show users that tags are saved from the onboarding quiz, but can also be updated if the users’ preferences ever change.

Usability Testing

After creating our mid-fi prototypes, we conducted usability testing to see if our user flows were intuitive for users to navigate. The demographic that we tested was UC Davis students between the ages of 18 to 21. We ran tests with five different users and gave them each three tasks to go through. These tasks included going through onboarding, saving a dinner event from the homepage, and adding tags to the profile page. We chose these three tasks because they captured the most important flows in our app.

We received both positive and constructive feedback during our user testing. We found that users wanted an option to “see all” events on the homepage. Before user testing, users could view events by each day, week, or month, but users wanted the option to see all future events. To save events, we were using a heart button. However, users reported that this could be confused with “liking” an event rather than saving it to view later. To fix this issue, we replaced the heart button with a bookmark button. Our original design of the profile page looked more like a typical social media page, with a bio for users to edit. We received feedback that the bio was unnecessary, so we removed it from the profile. We also found in our testing that users enjoyed the option to filter events and create tags to personalize their event recommendations. Users also stated that the flows were easy to navigate overall. The feedback we received allowed us to improve the design and flow of our app.

Hi-Fi

When it was finally time to work on High Fidelity Mockups, we first started off by looking online for inspiration that gave the “nightlife” feel. We wanted to implement gradients to imitate a sunset look, but we struggled with the colors the most. We originally did not want to use purple since it looked too similar to other party apps, so we had to find a way to make it relevant to Davis. That led us to the idea of making Davis Themed Characters that represent their Party Personality Type. When we did the usability testing, the end of the quiz was only an overview page and we heard that it wasn’t very necessary, so we replaced that screen with a results page.

Once we finalized a color and design system, we showed our cohort our progress during our weekly stand ups, and were advised to change the background of our screens from a gradient to a solid dark color for accessibility reasons. It was hard for us at the moment because we only had about a week left till the project was due and we had to redo our entire design system for the most complex screens. We also made edits with our secondary colors and became more intentional with our choices as we were making these final edits before we turned it in together. Overall, we worked together to complete a well fleshed out prototype that we are proud of that is cohesive, communicative and appealing to the eye, despite the challenges we faced midway.

Onboarding/Personality Test:

Our onboarding personality test is designed to give the user a personalized event feed right as they enter the app. They can pick from preferred social events in the “bigger” and/or “casual” categories. We found from survey results that a large percentage of Davis residents enjoy casual hangouts, and wanted to give those particular users more choice. Users can also follow UC Davis affiliated organizations, as well as local businesses to stay up-to-date with their events. These choices are directly inputted into the “tags” and “following” sections on the profile page once the user finishes. At the end of the test, users are assigned a Davis themed character based on their personality. “DJ Moo-ndy” represents the high-energy partiers, and “Cool Cat Cheeto” represents the chiller nightlife goers.

Choosing Filters:

On the homepage, users have access to various filters for more control over their in-app experience. The two biggest filters are the “Explore” and “For You” page featured at the top. The “Explore” page displays all events happening each day, while the “For You” page is a personalized feed based on the user (like their tags, onboarding quiz results, and the algorithm). There are general category filters (bars, food, etc.) located under the explore/for you header. Once a category is chosen, users can choose from those filtered events, or further curate their results using the category-specific tags. Category-specific tags appear under the category filter once one of them is selected. At the top-left of the event cards is a drop down menu with a time filter. Across from the drop down menu is a “sort by” filter that has options for distance, price, popularity, and organizations that the user is following.

Looking at an Event Page:

When the user taps on an event card, they can easily view more information on the event such as the date, location, time, description, and any mutual friends who are going. This allows the user to decide whether or not the event is one they would be interested in attending. They are able to follow and contact the host, get directions, and add the event to your calendar. They can also share and bookmark the event and RSVP or purchase tickets if they choose to attend.

Profile:

The profile page allows the user to conveniently view their tags, events, and settings. Users can edit their tags by removing tags or adding new tags. These tags allow users to show the type of events they enjoy on their profile while also helping our app recommend them events that cater to their interests. Users can also view all of their events including events that they have said they’re going to, their bookmarked events, and events that they are hosting. Through the settings tab, users can update their personal information and also retake the onboarding quiz to possibly get a new result.

Chat + Adding Friends:

On the chat page, users can chat with friends and be added to group chats. Group chats may commonly be made for clubs and for specific events. Creating group chats for events encourages users to make connections with the other people attending that same event.

On the friends tab, users can view their suggested friends, existing friends, and friend requests. Friends are suggested based on if they share mutual friends and organizations. When going through friend requests, users may view the other user’s profile to see if they have tags, personality quiz results, or events in common.

Presentation

On presentation day, we met beforehand to practice going through our presentation a few times. We also met with our PM and she helped us think of answers to potential questions that we may be asked. While practicing questions, we made sure to always tie our responses back to our research and testing findings.

Our judge was Gabrielle Azurdia, a Senior UX Lead at Amazon Web Services. Some of the feedback we received was that our design had a good user flow and that our judge liked how the filters and personality quiz allowed for more personalization. We were also told that our app could have been more original since it looked similar to other existing nightlife apps. This is something that we would want to work on in our next steps.

Challenges

Our first challenge that we found during testing was trying to define what “nightlife” is. Going into this design sprint, we thought of “nightlife” as parties, clubbing, and going to bars. However, in our research, we found that the majority of people listed more casual events as their preferred nightlife activity. This changed the direction of our design as we made an effort to include a wide variety of events.

Our next challenge was creating a unique and effective design system. While creating our design, we struggled to differentiate it from other nightlife apps while keeping the dark color scheme we wanted. Additionally, our initial design system featured a gradient background on each page. After receiving feedback we decided to change our design system to be more simple.

Finally, we spent a lot of time learning Figma tools such as autolayout and creating our prototypes. While this was a challenge for us, our PM offered us support in learning how to use these tools.

Next Steps

Based on feedback we received, as well as our own team’s discretion, here are a few things we would love to implement into our project in the future:

  1. Hosting — Creating flows for what our app would look like for a host or organization.
  2. Research — Conducting another round of usability testing on our hi-fi prototype, and making changes accordingly.
  3. App Branding — Expanding and improving on our nightlife characters to add more “Davis personality” to our app.

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