WedEasy
A Wedding Planning Application
Design Methods Project by
Abel Aby John
Nishant Yadav
What was my role?
My role for this project was:
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User Research
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Conduct interviews
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Doing Competitor Analysis
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Creating user persona
- Brainstorming
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Creating Hi-fi UI
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Prototyping
Project duration
4 weeks
Tools used
What?
An immersive application which would help users to plan, organize, and decorate their wedding.
Why?
Wedding planning is becoming a booming industry, which is also one of the industries that has high expenditures. North Indian families have a lot of events and celebrations during the wedding season, which makes it difficult to manage, especially for a middle-class family on a tight budget.
Who?
For middle-class North Indian families with tight budget.
Project Brief
This study was undertaken to understand the influence of technology on modern weddings in India, which is helping the billion-dollar industry to grow at astonishing rates and discern various breakdowns in their user experience for planning a wedding and, moreover, try to address the pre-eminent issues through design interventions.
Problem Statement
The increasing number of wedding planners has made the wedding industry competitive but also too expensive, which an average middle-class family won't be able to afford. Since it is too expensive, middle-class families don't hire a wedding planner and do the whole wedding on their own.
What was the solution?
Creating a mobile application which would do the part of a wedding planner. This application was made focusing on the middle class Indian family, which would help them plan a wedding without actually hiring a wedding planner. Integrating this app with VR would allow the user to decorate according to their preferences.
What were the challenges that I faced?
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Finding literature that would give us more insights in the context of Indian weddings, more specifically North Indian weddings, even though we could find few papers related to weddings and wedding planning.
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It was hard to find something that could add value to our work.
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We had to shift to doing interviews instead of doing contextual inquiry, which impacted our information gathering.
Design Process
Sequence Model
Cultural Model
Research
Primary Research
Interview with Industry Expert and newlyweds.
Key Insights from Newlyweds
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We interviewed six couples who were recently married and two industry experts.
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The couple we interviewed informed us that most of the arrangements and settings were done through word of mouth and recommendations given by their family members.
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Two couples were from South India, where we realized that South Indian weddings aren't as extravagant when compared to North Indian weddings.
Key Insights from Industry Experts
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Most of the weddings that they have planned are for North Indians, and they do so because of their high budget and number of functions.
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The couple is always curious about how their venue will be designed.
Survey was distributed and data was collected through online platform.
The following were the key insights
What is my take from this?
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Since a wedding is a huge event in a person's life, it is really important for them for it to go seamlessly without any havoc or chaos, which is really difficult.
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The families are ready to spend a hefty amount to make sure everything goes according to the plan.
Secondary Research
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We read a few research papers aiming to understand how the wedding industry works in India.
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To find if any past research has been done regarding North Indian wedding planning.
The following were the key insights
Analysis and Identification
To get a better understanding of the users and their needs, Contextual Inquiry models were made.
Flow Model
Sequence Model
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Cultural Model
Competitor Analysis
We looked into few of the applications which were similar to our target audience and our goals.
Direct Competitors
While looking for features that are commonly available, we noticed a few gaps and issues with current competitors, which are mentioned below:
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They were mainly functioning on websites, and only a few, like WedMeGood and WeddingWire, had applications.
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They were more concerned with vendors and venues than with management.
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The users weren't given much information about the venue and their decorations to tell if the venue was good for their wedding.
Ideation
How might we?
How might we help the user plan the wedding efficiently, execute it and manage various seamless strings of events (pre wedding, during wedding and post wedding) in a less stressful and confusing way.
User Persona
We created a user persona related to the wedding, which helped us understand the overall user need and empathise with the end user.
Brainstorming Session
We selected a group of 8 participants, and we started brainstorming on concepts for wedding planning.
The participants were categorised in following ways:
Experience of wedding
Knowledge of technology
The following are the ones that were interesting:
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Immersive Experience using AR/VR for venue.
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AI to provide the best customisable wedding packages, deals,
plans, best matched vendors that suits their needs. -
App for Live updates of the wedding preparation status.
Ideation
We selected the first one and worked on it to improve the idea.
Immersive Experience : Virtual Reality + Application
letting the user decorate the wedding venue according to their needs and budget, which would enable the user to visualise how the wedding venue would look once it is all decorated with the décor the user picked.
We also thought of integrating other things which would help the user with planning the wedding.
Why this concept?
Virtual Reality is always something that amazes me, the way it tricks our brains into believing something that isn't actually there. Putting us into another space without actually moving to that space.
It was the time of Covid-19, we were all locked up at our houses, worried to move out, always being cautious of our surrounding. So this VR experiences would help the users just stay where they are and plan their whole wedding without moving anywhere.
