Austin Food & Wine Festival

What are we solving?

The 10th annual Austin Food & Wine Festival will be taking place in Austin, TX in November 2021. While over 10,000 Austinites get together to celebrate Austin's culinary world every year, only a very few know of the huge impact and missions behind the event. The sole beneficiary of all the funds raised from the festival is the Austin Food & Wine Alliance, which is a nonprofit dedicated to fostering awareness and innovation in the central Texas culinary community through grants, educational programming, and events.

The Project Snapshot

Discovering & Defining the Areas of Opportunity

Identifying What Is (or Not) Working

Through user research and interviews, we discovered that our users are usually busy, so they want an easy and quick way to learn about the event and buy a ticket. They have the need to connect with their local businesses and find more ways to be supportive and active in their community. They have also expressed interest in features like a personal day-of schedule builder and quick ways to access answers to their frequently asked questions.

The Constraints

Because our client is preparing for their 10th anniversary event, there was very limited information on their current site. All pages have outdated information, and a newsletter signup for those interested in keeping up with the 2021 updates.

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Ideating & Designing Solutions

Understanding the Vibe

While much of our team collaboration was within the discovery phase, our team split up to start the developing stage. To start, my teammate Jordan and I ran a design studio time to both make our own versions of mood boards and discuss what we came up with to create a final version. While Jordan's moodboard gives a more authentic Austin feel, my moodboard conveys a more classy wine festival vibe. After our discussions, our final conclusion was that the Austin Food & Wine Festival is somewhere inbetween the two.

Putting Pen to Paper

After reviewing our client, user, and competitive research, our team went into another design studio to start sketching out some of the main pages we knew we needed. This would include pages like:

• Home page
• About Alliance page
• Buy ticket flow/checkout pages
• Event Schedule page

The V1 Solution: Highlighting the Alliance

Through our research, we understood our festival attendees' enthusiasm in learning more about the Alliance and how they can be supportive in their local communities. Taking this insight and the request from our client themselves about not detracting from the event, we decided to do the following:

1. Add a section highlighting the festival purpose and Alliance on home page
2. Dedicating separate page for the Alliance and adding page to global navigation
3. Add simple blurb at the start of checkout to remind users of their impact as they begin buying a ticket for the event
4. Create a space on order confirmation page with stats of how purchased ticket impacted the Alliance + local businesses.

The V1 Solution: Enhancing the Day-Of Experience

From our user interviews, we gathered and mapped out what attendees would like to see or learn about to enhance their day-of festival experience. First, they had many questions regarding the day-of event logistics including accessibility, directions to the venue/parking, scheduling, etc. In addition to those questions, a few also asked about viewing the schedule and potentially building their own for the day-of. We took those suggestions and ideated around these solutions:

1. Quick access to information with search function
2. Quick links section on home page
3. Chef profile pages and building your own schedule functionality
4. List vs. timeline view of the personal schedule attendees build

Usability Test Results #1

The Final Deliverables

The Final Deliverable: Mobile Experience

1. Moved the search bar into the global navigation and replaced with account login icon
2. Moved quick links section down on the home page and moved the Alliance information above fold
3. Changed wording on global navigation category pages (ie. Our Purpose to Our Alliance, and Get Help to Contact Us)

The Brand Standards

While we were tasked to uncover areas of improvement on the current site, I wanted to make sure we design with acute focus on our client and users needs. As the lead designer, I did not think a total brand refresh would be necessary to achieve a clean, simple, and enjoyable online experience for our festival attendees. Also, 2021 marks the 10th annual year of the Austin Food & Wine Festival, we wanted to ensure our concept redesign would carry over the brand equity. Instead of a complete brand refresh, we: 

• Recommended using a slightly darker red as their secondary color as their current secondary color is too bright and contrasted from the rest of the content, which makes it hard to focus on anything else.
• Created a simple brand standard guide to help our client keep their branding consistent throughout the website and other channels.