A Partiful Exploration of the Event Customization Page

Overview

Partiful is one of the most popular event planning platforms targeted towards the Gen Z and Millennial demographic. Compared to competitors like Eventbrite and Facebook, Partiful is highly customizable, enabling users to truly capture the vibe of their party or event and delight their guests.

Our group was tasked with designing new additions to Partiful's Event Customization Page, which is where users create and customize their events before inviting guests. In particular, our goal was to make the page customization experience even more "Partiful" — to prompt unexpected delight, irreverence, and FUN! 💃🕺 A more flushed out version of our problem statement can be found in our project brief.

Note: since Partiful has an established platform and design system, our aim was not a complete redesign. Instead, our goal was to introduce new, additional features on top of the existing interface and functionality that would enhance the user experience of event page customizations.

The current Partiful Event Customization Page!

Part I: Ideation & Sketching

To kickstart the design process, we began by examining the existing features Partiful offers and brainstorming a laundry list of potential features to add to the Partifulines of the event customization page. Eventually, we arrived at the following set of ideas to start:

• Incorporating music into the invite pages sent to guests
• Title font customization
• Animated or interactive cover images (e.g. by including guest faces in the image)
• Custom page theme generators, either through AI or a color/gradient selector
• Custom emojis/messages for RSVP-ing to events
• Ability to tag events (e.g. by rave, birthday, etc.)
• Custom layout options for invite pages, possibly creatable via a drag-and-drop interface

Maybe something like this could be partiful... 🧐

Below are some sketches to demonstrate some example flows for some of these features:

Font Customization

Theme Customization

Music Customization

In the end, we decided to adopt the third font customization sketch, first theme customization sketch, and first music customization sketch for our final set of wireframes, which showcase our initial designs for said features. The main design considerations for each feature we added are as follows:

We decided not to go with our cover image customization and other laundry list items, mostly either due to us perceiving the features as either more technically difficult to implement (for engineers) or simply less of a priority for Partiful as a business.

Part II: Initial Wireframing & Critiques

Based off our initial ideation, discussion, and sketches, our first wireframes can be seen below (through an embedded Figma file):

After recording an overview of our designs with Loom and sharing it with others through studio or email, we received the following critiques:

Part III: Revised Wireframes

After taking our previous rounds of feedback into account, we developed some more refined, low-fidelity wireframes shown below:

Part IV: Style Guide & High-Fidelity Wireframing

Once we were confident with our wireframes, we developed a style guide.

Our style guide covers Partiful's established design system as well as our component and icon additions. Any elements that we added to the interface were uniform with Partiful’s existing event page interface. All of the fonts, accent colors, and existing components as well as their interactive states did not change. In terms of the decisions Partiful made for their design system, we noticed that their accent colors were intentionally neon to stand out against any selected theme. Further, we noticed that they kept their font color white throughout the page to provide high contrast against all themes they have available. The use of the font style Syne is part of their brand identity, which is why it is the default title font.

Once we were confidence with our wireframes, we developed our interactive high-fidelity prototypes for our proposed features, shown below:

Our main changes that we adopted from the critiques were:

• We agreed with the feedback on the theme customization and decided to scrap our original AI and gradient ideas, instead implementing a similar interface with a simple slider to adjust the hue for each individual theme
• We also decided to add the feature for interactive cover images (particularly, those with face cutouts) as it seemed particularly “Partiful” in inducing unexpected delight from guests
• We ended up rejecting the studio feedback suggestions for more custom layouts, as we believed that the increase in layout options was more likely to be overwhelming for users while providing little benefit in “Partiful” expressiveness.
• We also were fine with the multi-page modal of the song selection flow, as combining everything into a single page modal didn’t seem necessary and would possibly lead to information overload

Here is the Loom walkthrough of our final product:

Part V: Final Founder Feedback & Next Steps

After our final rounds of revisions and high-fidelity wireframing, we met with designers, engineers, and founders at Partiful to showcase our work. Overall, while received praise for our innovative designs which captured the "Partiful" spirit, we received a few points of feedback for each of our final flows:

Flow 1: Theme Hue Customization 🎨

• Problem: It is unclear how to reset the theme to its original state from the current hue slider
• Solution: To fix this potential pain point, we decided that clicking the selected theme again or making the hue bar sticky could be mechanisms to revert the theme to its default color

Flow 2: Title Font Customization ✍🏼

• Problem: The current font side pop up would likely not work with the small left margins on a mobile screen
• Solution: Making the font a pop up that goes right on top of the title font section with a horizontal scroll could solve this responsiveness issue

Flow 3: Music 🎶

• Problem: The pop up for choosing an event theme song blocks the cover image, which makes the pulse animation difficult to preview unless the user fully exits the pop up. It is also unclear that the song clip duration selector is a drop down
• Solution: We came to a consensus that making sure the pulsing starts when the toggle is selected and making the pop up smaller would allow the user to demo and decide on the pulsing rather than repetitively going between the pop up and interface, and adding a small icon to the dropdown to make it more discoverable would solve the latter issue

Flow 4: Partiful Your Guests 🎉

• Problem: While the font cover image and back “Partiful your guests” image flip on click, that clickable interaction is hard to realize for the user
• Solution: We successfully proposed that the cover could automatically flip every 5 seconds, although that could become overboard with the pulsing, or that there could be some icon to indicate the cover is flippable

If time permits, we would love to take this feedback into account and apply them to our Figma designs to further improve upon our existing wireframes!

Reflection

Overall, we had a ton of fun with this project and loved the experience working with Partiful (whose product we all use)!

The most valuable part of the iterative design process was receiving really specific, thoughtful feedback from our points of contact. We saw how important good feedback is as it illuminated crucial blind spots for us to consider that enabled us to refine and ultimately build a better product. Although we know that Partiful is more focused on building out the robustness of user networking on the platform to get more users right now, we hope that some of our ideas are implemented at some point. Regardless, we want to give Partiful a huge shoutout for giving us this wonderful opportunity to work with them on this project for the past few weeks!