A Partiful Exploration of Partiful's Event Customization Page

In collaboration with Partiful, my team was tasked with designing new additions to their Event Customization Page, which is where users create and customize their events before inviting guests. In particular, our goal was to make the page customization experience even more "Partiful" — to prompt unexpected delight, irreverence, and FUN! 💃🕺

My role focused on design iteration for the music flow, as well as polishing the idea for the face-cutout cover images. This project highlights design iteration skills, receiving feedback, and groupwork.

Overview

Background & Objective

Partiful is one of the most popular event planning platforms targeted towards the Gen Z and Millennial demographic. Compared to competitors like Eventbrite and Facebook, Partiful is highly customizable, enabling users to truly capture the vibe of their party or event and delight their guests.

Since Partiful has an established platform and design system, our aim was not a complete redesign. Instead, our goal was to introduce new, additional features on top of the existing interface and functionality that would enhance the user experience of event page customizations.

The current Partiful Event Customization page!

I. Ideation and Sketching

I began by examining the existing features Partiful offers and helping my team brainstorm a "laundry list" of potential features to add. Eventually, we arrived at the following set of ideas:

Incorporating music into the invite pages sent to guests
Title font customization
Animated or interactive cover images (e.g. by including guest faces in the image)
Custom page theme generators, either through AI or a color/gradient selector
Custom emojis/messages for RSVP-ing to events
Ability to tag events (e.g. by rave, birthday, etc.)
Custom layout options for invite pages, possibly creatable via a drag-and-drop interface

Maybe something like this could be partiful...🧐

We decided to focus on music, font, and theme customization. We chose not to design for the other laundry list items, mostly either due to us perceiving the features as either more technically difficult to implement (for engineers) or simply less of a priority for Partiful as a business.

Below are sketches of our example flows for the chosen features:

Font Customization Sketches

(my sketch)

Theme Customization Sketches

(my sketch)

Music Addition Sketches

(my sketch)

Feature Decisions

Music 🎶 (my focus)

After discussion, I chose to place the add music feature on top of the title, instead of above the cover as shown in my original sketch. From the invitee’s perspective, the option to play and pause the music would be more intuitive to find when located above the title. Music would also come with animations such as the cover image pulsing and dancing wavelengths by the title.

Fonts ✍🏼

We narrowed down our design to either utilize the larger modal or the smaller side pop-up. We eventually decided on using the smaller side pop-up since it would allow users to view the effect of changing the title font without having to constantly open/close a modal.

Theme 🎨

We decided on keeping both options for creating custom themes: using generative AI and a gradient/color selector, as we believed that the additional flexibility would encourage hosts to use Partiful.

II. Initial Wireframing and Critiques

Based off our initial ideation, discussion, and sketches, our first wireframes can be seen below (through an embedded Figma file):

After recording an overview of our designs with Loom, we received the following critiques from our classmates and client:

From Partiful

Slightly opposed to the complexity of the AI generation and vast range of options for creating a custom color/gradient theme background, citing concerns of low contrast, poor readability, and clutteredness of the theme customization UI
Instead, they preferred for us to incorporate color customization into their existing themes, e.g. by being able to add a hue to slightly modify the theme color
They also suggested a slight pivot in our creative direction, preferring the “partifuliness” of the custom cover images showcasing guest/host faces

From CS1300 classmates

Concern about whether adding a pulsing cover image animation along with the music would be too distracting
Potentially shortening the flow for picking a song, since the current modal to do so is multi-page
Consider adding even more customization options, such as drag-and-drop builders for a more personalized template

III. Revisions

After a couple rounds of revising our wireframes based on feedback, we developed a style guide:

Using our guide and sticking to Partiful's brand identity, we developed our design prototype (best viewed full-screen):

Our main actions from the critiques were:

Scrapping our original AI + gradient theme ideas, instead implementing theme customization as a simple slider to adjust hue for each existing theme
Adding the feature for interactive (face cutout) cover images
Not adding more custom layouts, as this was more likely to be overwhelming for users while providing little benefit in "Partiful"ness
Keeping the multi-page modal of song selection flow

IV. Final Founder Feedback and Next Steps

After our final rounds of revisions and high-fidelity wireframing, we met with designers, engineers, and founders at Partiful to showcase our work. Overall, while we received praise for our innovative designs which captured the "Partiful" spirit, we received a few points of feedback for each of our final flows:

Flow 1: Music Addition 🎶

Problem: The pop up for choosing an event theme song blocks the cover image, which makes the pulse animation difficult to preview unless the user fully exits the pop up. It is also unclear that the song clip duration selector is a drop down.
Solution: Have the cover pulse in the background when the toggle is selected and making the pop up smaller. Add a small icon to the dropdown to make it more discoverable.

Flow 2: Font Selection ✍🏼

Problem: The current font side pop up would likely not work with the small left margins on a mobile screen.
Solution: Make the font a pop up that goes right on top of the title font section with a horizontal scroll. This way it is accessible on any device.

Flow 3: Theme Hue Customization 🎨

Problem: It is unclear how to reset the theme to its original state from the current hue slider.
Solution: Implement an intuitive "reset" option, such as re-clicking the selected theme or making the hue bar sticky to reset in the middle.

Flow 4: Partiful Your Guests Cover 🎉

Problem: While the front cover image and back “Partiful your guests” image flip on click, that clickable interaction is hard to realize for the user
Solution: Add a "flip" icon to indicate the cover is flippable.

If time permits, I would love to take this feedback into account and apply them to our Figma designs to further improve upon our existing wireframes!

Reflection

Overall, I had a ton of fun with this project and loved the experience working with Partiful (whose product I had used many times before)!

The most valuable part of the iterative design process was receiving really specific, thoughtful feedback from our points of contact. I saw how important good feedback is as it illuminated crucial blind spots for us to consider that enabled us to refine and ultimately build a better product. Although we know that Partiful is more focused on other aspects of the product right now, I hope that some of our ideas are helpful for future design of the event customizations page. :)

Regardless, huge shoutout to Partiful for giving us this wonderful opportunity to work with them on this 3-week long project!

Partiful cover image of Ice Spice and the team

Us as Ice Spice on a new, very Partiful cover image 🥳