PROJECT OVERVIEW: With digital news subscriptions trending on the decline, we wanted to find ways to pivot our publications to be more than just local and national news sources. We saw an opportunity to increase user engagement by creating a more robust events section, which could potentially lead to hosting branded events with our readers. We already had the building blocks for this - our publications all report on local events and many even had basic event calendars, but the experiences were disjointed. We sought to create a more seamless and integrated user experience by allowing users to not only read about an event, but also easily purchase tickets right from the site. They could also learn about transportation options, see who else was attending and even arrange for a carpool buddy. New revenue streams would derive from referral fees for ticket sales, sponsored event pages and even sponsorships of the actual events.

GOAL: Explore how to create a robust Events section that would:

1. give users an additional reason to visit our publications 

2. create a new revenue stream.

MY ROLE: UX Designer. I was tasked with crafting a digital strategy for our Events section. I started with an audit of our existing events sections to see where we stood. It was encouraging that many of our sites already had a fairly robust events section which included calendars, filtering capability and highlighting of popular events. The downside was that there were several different templates for the Events section across many of our publications. In order to streamline the development process and also to make our brands more cohesive, we'd need to create a unified events system to be used across all our publications.

Next, I audited our major competitors, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as some sites known to be popular event hubs such as Bands in Town, Facebook, Yelp & Thrillist, to see what we could learn from them. Map views were popular and a great way to see what was happening nearby or in another town you may be visiting. Many of these sites also heavily curated their events to guide their readers to specific events. 

Finally, I created high level concept wireframes for how we could templatize our Events pages. 

LEARNINGS: Unfortunately, the project never took shape beyond my initial concepts. As a company, we were not ready to embark on such a large endeavor. Regardless, it was exciting to find new avenues for our website to attract readership and it was a reminder that strategic business ideas can come from any department. If we were to proceed, I would have liked to work more directly with our Business Development team and Marketing team to get a more cohesive plan together, and do user interviews to see if this would have been an attractive feature on a news site. 

Internal Audit

Part of the audit of Tribune Events content

Competitive Audit

Event Detail Page

Draft of Events Landing Page

Draft of Curated Article Page with links to easily purchase event tickets.