Revamped the website, resulting in over 20,000 sign-ups.

Overview

Veggie Fest Chicago is a large-scale wellness and food festival celebrating vegetarian cuisine, healthy living, and community in the Chicago suburbs.

Project Details:

Client: Veggie Fest Chicago
Duration: February 2024 - August 2024
Tools: Figma, Photoshop
Role: UX / UI Designer

Challenge

The Veggie Fest Chicago website experienced significant user drop-off on the homepage, with low engagement rates and friction in accessing critical event information. This lack of usability directly impacted conversions, limiting registrations and diminishing overall user satisfaction.

Impact

Revamped the website to enhance usability, reducing the time to find key information by 50%, lowering the bounce rate, and driving 500 registrations on launch day, with 20,000 sign-ups over three months.

My Role

Conducted user research and analysis to identify key pain points.
Redesigned the UX and UI with a focus on mobile-first design principles.
Created a design library kit for consistency across the site.
Conducted usability testing to validate design decisions.
Designed a high-fidelity prototype in Figma
Worked with developer in Wordpress to implement design

Assessing UX Before the Redesign:

Interviews & Usability Testing: Conducted with 10 festival attendees to understand pain points.

User Research: Uncovering user frustrations

Difficulty finding key information: Users struggled to locate essential details like the festival date, time, and schedule.
Cluttered navigation: The menu was overcrowded, making it hard to identify important sections and next steps.
Inconsistent layout: Repeated categories and unclear labels frustrated users, disrupting their journey.
No filters: The lack of filters made it harder for users to quickly find relevant content.

Solutions:

Mobile-first redesign: Enhanced usability by ensuring the site is fully responsive, allowing seamless navigation on smartphones and tablets, which addressed user challenges in accessing information.
Restructured navigation: Simplified the information architecture to improve access to essential details, such as the festival schedule, reducing cognitive load and streamlining user journeys.
Prominent visual elements: Positioned key visuals, including festival highlights, featured video and CTA, at the top of the homepage to maximize engagement and guide users effectively.
Intuitive UX enhancements: Introduced features like horizontal scrolling for featured speakers and a tailored festival map, facilitating quick access to important information. Also, implemented filtering options for users to sort festival offerings by categories, making it easier to discover relevant content.
Improved accessibility: Applied WCAG standards to enhance color contrast and text readability. Optimized color contrast for bright light viewing to accommodate festival attendees using the site outdoors in sunny conditions. Used Figma plugins, such as Stark, to verify color accessibility and text legibility throughout the design process.
Focused on usability: Implemented keyboard navigation and made essential information, like free parking details, easily accessible on the homepage to better serve diverse user needs.

Home Page - Before

Implementation

High-fidelity prototype: Developed in Figma to ensure alignment with developers and stakeholders.

WordPress integration: Collaborated with two developers to implement the design in WordPress using Elementor, facilitating dynamic content management and ensuring the site remains user-friendly for the client.