SPOTLIME | Lauralugaresi

SUMMARY

WHAT IS SPOTLIME?

1.5 Million $ founded Italian start-up
Event discovery app focus on entertainment in the main Italian cities
Users can buy tickets or reserve a spot and benefit from special offers
Target is 18-32 years old
Free App (AppStore, GooglePlay) 150.000+ downloads

TEAM

10 people
23-29 years old
Engineers, economists, lawyers, marketers, designers

OPPORTUNITY

In Milan, each weekend university students hang out together. Every time they have the same question:

"What shall we do tonight? "
People crave for cool events, exclusive parties, and new experiences. Our goal was to give them a tool to discover the nightlife in the city.

GOAL

The goal was to grow the number of orders, reducing as much as possible the costs.

With a constant user-centered approach, we put the users first in every step, understanding their needs and problem in any action, in order to enhance the experience of the product.

MY ROLE

I joined the marketing team. I carried out user research and testing together with the CTO and the Marketing Specialist.
I was also in charge of communication, and visual design.

CHALLENGES

Bring user from a virtual to a real-life experience
Highly competitive marketplace, with well-established players
A young and new-to-the-field team, few people and a lot of things to improve.

PROCESS

We used a user-centered approach in every area of the project, from product improvement to advertising.

Each individual challenge had a different target and employed diverse tools. However, we always kept thinking about the user first.

We started everything from a research on the field and I spent most of my time talking, analyzing and defining our users, in order to understand their mental models and to carefully meet their needs.

RESEARCH PROCESS

GUERRILLA RESEARCH

We ran about 50 usability test for each new function improvement. As part of our daily routine, we spent 30min a day collecting feedbacks from people on the street. The guerrilla testing main objective was to uncover pain points in the app user experience, understand user perception of the product and user needs.

For the onboarding and first use, we tested it in a common meeting point in Milan, at the time people gather together to hang out. In this way, we observed the reaction to the app in the exact moment when the user needs it.

For the offer redemption, we did guerrilla testing in the venue, observing e and checking the experience of the user at the moment of the event.

Key insights

The guerrilla research was the most useful research tools and taught us to talk the same language of our users. It stimulated us to improve the product according to real needs and to shape the brand image in a valuable way. We pivoted the style of the contents understanding what was more trending.

END-USER INTERVIEWS

We ran about 20 end-user interviews each month, inviting people into the office.

We interviewed potential users who never tried the app and "power users" too.

The interviews had the double function of understanding the user needs/pain points, and to start building a relationship with them.

During the interviews, we asked questions referring to demographics, and the following open-ended questions to understand their mental models and their attitude towards events and going out:

How often do they go out?
What do they usually do?
What are their criteria for choosing an event?
Which tools do they use to seek for events?

Key insight

Through the interviews, we generated a channel to directly communicate with the end-user. We collected information about the trends and the needs of the users. We used the data to draw the user journey map.

EXPERT INTERVIEWS

In order to reduce biases by talking to end-users only, we had a monthly meeting with nightlife influencers and event organizers in Milan. The purpose was to gather key takeaways from their party-organization expertise and helpful tips on how to create a winning product for our users.

We wanted to get a deeper dive into the behaviors and expectations of the user group, understanding their preferences and motivations.

Especially when we launched the product in other cities, experts interviews have been crucial for understanding the specific target and current local trends.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

We kept an eye on the worldwide competition, to understand what was working well, what common standards were being used and how others solved problems similar to our ones, even if in a different context. We created and monthly updated a high-level inventory of the main contents and functionalities of the top 4 competing services.

We also collected the information, selling point and weakness of the direct and indirect competition in the same context, looking at tools providing similar services in Milan

DATA ANALYSIS

The analysis department of the start-up delivered every week a full set of data collected mainly by

Appsflyer, SQL, Google analytics.
All the data were reviewed and used to analyze marketing campaigns and usability improvements.

The main information was about:

open app
events view
length of session
purchases
source download
track link
conversion tracking

SUMMARY

PROCESS

RESEARCH

PERSONAS

I created a provisional persona for a typical user for Spotlime based on early research.
After many iterations of fieldworks, interviews, and deeper analysis, we came out with two different personas, based on the two user groups of the app.

USER JOURNEY

USER JOURNEY MAP

We scripted the typical routine of using the app for each persona, from the initial discovery to the second purchase. This process helped us to understand better the whole experience, emotions and pain points.

We could track where in the process the users had negative feelings, and we could identify the right channels to use in every step to improve the experience.

Pain Point: EVENT RECOMMENDATION

PROBLEM

The goal of the app is to simplify and make faster the choice of an event for the user.

Avoiding to show probably not interesting content, the main screen displays only 10 events to each user, carefully selected out of 30, by a preference-based algorithm.
However, this is not often understood, and one of the most frequent complains is about the small number of events showed.

So the challenge was: communicate to the users that Spotlime is an "event selector" and makes their choice easier.

SOLUTION

I started sketching out solutions on paper to give freedom to my flow of thought and not be constrained by details. My main objective was to create a clearer evidence of the selection.

I started designing 3 more screens at the first app opening: initial description and a quick test of preferences.

In this way user realized to be choosing the content.

After user testing, we found out that users found the test annoying, and they preferred to skip it. Or they were afraid of loose something. After a few months of more testing, we decided to remove the test, and show all the events to everybody.

An algorithm changes the order of events depending on single person use of the app, and through a filter, a specific chategory can be choosen.