Reddit: Designing the Reddit Events Calendar for Desktop

2018 • USER RESEARCH • UX • UI • PRODUCT DESIGN • DESKTOP WEB

PROJECT OVERVIEW

About Reddit Events & the Problems to Solve

Please refer to the Reddit Events Calendar for Native iOS case study for more details.

Results & Solutions

Designed the MVP of a Reddit Events Calendar that allows for both following, unfollowing as well as discovery of new events that are happening at the moment or scheduled on Reddit
Designed and mapped out multiple entry points for each user’s Reddit Calendar on desktop web

Role & Timeline

Owned the entirety of the project as the main Product Designer, while working with a PM and a team of engineers
The desktop (web) calendar was designed in 2 weeks.

A (MILDLY) DIFFERENT STORY: THE DESIGN PROCESS

To avoid being repetitive, I’ll keep this short — as much of the process for the desktop design correlates with that of the native design of the calendar. In any case, there were a few key differences.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll be focusing this case study the parts of design process emphasized below and the parts of each step that differ from that of the Reddit Events Calendar for Native iOS.

I. Discovery

Competitive Analysis

The first difference was that I conducted a different type of competitive analysis of “events” units used for products such as Facebook Events, Eventbrite, Ticketfly and SeatGeek on desktop, prior to the Ideation stage.

II. Define

Core Features
Information Architecture
User Flow

NECESSARY CORE FEATUREs

While all of the necessary core features remained the same for the desktop calendar and the native iOS calendar, there was more focus based on these three particular features as the “Discovery” experience was less limiting to design on Reddit’s desktop site.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

The overarching information architecture for the desktop calendar is also similar to that of the native iOS calendar — with the same limitations, in terms of Reddit’s lack of categories. However, the entry points differ.

USER FLOW

The only major difference between the desktop calendar and the native calendar are the interactions in regards to notifications when an event is about to start, as it will be pinned to the top of the user’s home feed and a notification toast will appear (no matter where the user is in their Reddit experience). Furthermore, defining notifications settings and the ability to turn them on or off were out-of-scope for this project.

SKIPPING AHEAD...

IV. Validation

User Insights

USER INSIGHTS

I was able to conduct some user research to gain insights in the Validation stage of my process, post-ideation, with users primarily unfamiliar with Reddit with the final exploratory designs. Ultimately, leading to the final design solution.

Option A:

Option B:

After conducting 3 user interviews — showing strangers who aren’t familiar with Reddit — these two options and flows. It was obvious across the board that Option B was the right design solution as Option A was incredibly confusing to these non-Redditors, for they thought the “classic view” event units were actually comments rather than individual events.

Furthermore, those I spoke with felt that Option B, with the “card view” feed when narrowed down by date provided a better browsing experience — especially in the context of “Discovery.”