My team and role at Weddup
Wedupp is a Mumbai-based startup designing digital experiences in the wedding planning and management space. I got an opportunity to work with a super talented team of 7 members:
Working as a solo designer on the team I performed: -
- UX Design validation
- Market research
- Brain storming
- Journey mapping
- Defining visual language
- Ideation & Sketching
- User flows
- Hi-Fi Prototypes
THE PROBLEM
Indian couples want easy to plan - personalized and socially inclusive weddings.
Couples are becoming more and more creative about the events and experiences they want to have at their weddings. ‘Fusion of traditions with unique experiences' is becoming the new theme of weddings.
Have become the buzzwords today...
in a $50Billiion worth of wedding industry, this opened 2 major market opportunities for Wedupp
THE SOLUTION
We introduced an integrated system of wedding planning software and an app for creating personalized experiences for the couples and the guests...
In collaboration with my team, I did research and market analysis, endless brainstorming, creating a design system with interactive prototypes over many sleepless nights, and “you are doing great” type of client presentations, I designed an experience in the wedding market from scratch.
RESEARCH STUDY
How are couples planning their weddings today?
Co-founders at Wedupp had done some prior research with the couples to understand their current wedding planning practices and their needs.
To validate the wedding planning concepts that they had, I conducted interviews with 2 couples and
2 co-founders.
Co-founders say...
We have observed that most couples who plan to have destination weddings hire a wedding planner.
Couples say...
We want to personally be involved in the wedding planning process while the wedding managers handles the responsibilites
Some key observations from the flow:
And 3 reccurent themes that the couples are looking for:
1. DIGITIZE
2. PERSONALIZE
3. SOCIALIZE
use of digital devices to:
plan events
talk with planners
send digital invites
interact with guests
MARKET STUDY
Is the current market satisfying our user needs?
To understand the market gaps and opportunities, I asked couples various applications they had explored and extracted the top 10 mobile applications for review.
All the products had at least 1 feature incorporated that the couples wanted
Digitize wedding planning
Personalized features
Social & interactive elements
But the couples felt that there was something missing
Wedupp had a similar application to help couples in the wedding space. But was it solving their problem in any way?
I shared a demo of the application with my friends & family who had at least once had an experience of either planning a wedding or attending a wedding.
Customer feedback highlighted the market gaps
Non Inclusive weddings
Couples felt that these apps did not comply with other religions than Indian Hindu weddings.
Limited Personalization
The app did not accommodate unique themes and requirements for the wedding
Lack of single solution
The applications failed to sync the socialization application and wedding planner application.
And we saw it as our business opportunities...
1.
How might we create applications in the wedding space more inclusive?
2.
How might we provide a more personal, unique & interactive wedding experience?
3.
How might we design an one for all solution?
REFLECTION FROM INTERVIEWS
Couples felt that the applications were not inclusive of the religions & cultures & moods
Most couples felt that the applications were designed for a particular religious population and had a specific theme that might not adapt to their plans.
Elements like colors, labels, and icons were making the applications look non-inclusive of the religions. The formal look was another concern for users who wanted a festive mood for their weddings
SOLUTION
I worked on defining the visual language for a more inclusive and joyful experience
Colors:
Visual artifacts:
Body Copy
KNOWING THE USERS
For whom are we designing? Even though couples wanted personalization, guests were the primary users of the application
IDEATION
Listing down ideas for guests experience:
Due to limited time, we put ourselves in the user's shoes. Since all of us on the Wedupp team had attended at least 1 wedding in our lifetimes, we had some experience and expectations regarding such events; we listed all of them down
We jotted down the ideas we had for improving the guests' experience:
And I prioritized the based on the feasibilty (efforts and time) vs the imapct on the stake holders
SOLUTION
Adding personalization & engagement features to the User flow
KNOWING THE USER
Wedding planners are involved from the start till the end of the wedding. Therefore we traced thier tasks and designed expereinces accordingly
Tracing Planner requirements through journey maps
IDEATION
We explored 3 major ways to unify the requirements gathering process for the planners
Idea 1: Couples to create a checklist
Proposal:
Couples will create a checklist listing all their requirements.
Rejected because:
It tasking as planers will have to translate all the requirements to their systems/sheets with a risk of misunderstanding.
Idea 2: Wedding planning templates
Proposal:
Create editable templates for the wedding planners to manage requirements and guestlists.
Rejected because:
Templates are difficult to maintain progress and it still does not give any option to communicate with teams.
Idea 3: The wedding dashboard
Proposal:
Wedding dashboards to maintain team details, couple preferences, guest lists integrated with team communication features.
✅ Approved because:
Dashboard provided the wedding planners a complete solution to their problem.
To unify the process of team management and, planner - team communication we proposed a team collab feature.
Team and task management feature
Proposal:
A collaborative feature where the planners can create teams, define task lists, assign them to the team members, and do real-time communication in a single place.
✅ Approved because:
The planners liked this solution as it eliminated the dependency on multiple applications and made their tasks seamless.
To provide planners with we had to integrate the guest features with the wedding planner application. Thus we created a service blueprint.
view final solution
