The Asian American International Film Festival is the nation's first and longest-running festival of its kind established in 1978 by Asian Cinevision. It runs a week-long every summer in NYC. I joined the web team to help improve the user experience and contributed to both UX design and web development.
Users find it confusing to purchase tickets online, leading to wrong tickets being bought, high numbers of customer emails, and revenue loss for the organization.
Based on email data, our assumptions are that this is due to unclear information and cluttered interface of the current website. The ticketing page contains language that is not clear to everyone, leading to poor readability. The FAQs page is too overwhelming, making it hard to navigate. In addition, Elevent, the third-party ticketing system, provides limited customization, preventing a smooth user flow.
The main objective is to make the ticketing page more user-friendly by providing clear information about the different types of tickets and what each of the passes include. Aditionally, creating a simple ticket purchasing flow with instructions would allow the user to seamlessly complete their task.
The success of this project will be measured by the following KPIs:
My role was UX designer from conception to delivery in collaboration with fellow UX designer Lauren Chun. Our team included a UX lead, web developers, and a project manager.
April 2024 - June 2024
Based on the information provided by the stakeholders and after evaluating the ticket purchasing flow, we decided to conduct a round of usability testing of the current website that would give us a better understanding of the specific user pain points.
The objective of this research phase was to validate our initial assumptions as explained under the project goal.
These are the subjects we focused on during testing:
The results confirmed our initial assumptions, but most importantly, brought to light pain points we hadn't anticipated, increasing the scope of our project and urging us to reconsider our original plan. These issues involved the main festival program page and the individual event pages, which were still part of the ticket purchasing user flow. Below are detailed notes on the findings.
While working on the usability testing, we conducted a competitive analysis of other film events in the market to further inform our process. After some initial research, we chose to focus on the most popular ones. It was helpful to learn how they each package and describe their tickets and passes and how they display event data.
Our research revealed two key challenges:
How might we create an intuitive event discovery and ticket purchasing experience that guides festival-goers with easily accessible information?
We scoped out the project by building a priority matrix in order to meet our tight deadline. From here on, Lauren focused on desiging the Ticketing and FAQs pages and navigation bar, while I focused on the Festival Program and Event Detail pages.
Guided by our research insights, we mapped out a simple user flow that would drive user conversion. The solution featured two key components: an intuitive filtering system that simplified event discovery and a ticketing widget that clearly presented all purchase options, strategically highlighting the value of full festival access to encourage pass purchases over single tickets.
Through multiple review sessions and stakeholder feedback, I refined the designs to accommodate various event edge cases and finalized the responsive layouts. Throughout this process, I maintained consistent alignment with the organization's established design system to ensure visual cohesion across the platform.
The web team at AAIFF's Opening Party 🎉
