CLIENT

Toronto International Festival of Authors

Canada’s longest running literary festival with year round events, book launches, and an 11-day celebration every autumn. TIFA is a subsidiary of Harbourfront Centre.

ROLE

Research Lead Design Lead

TEAM

1 Designer 2 Developers

TIMELINE

Apr - Sep, 2023

THE USER

The TIFA User is a reading enthusiast who enjoys attending in-person literary events

PRIMARY TASKS

→ browsing events

→ purchasing tickets

PROBLEM

Selling festival passes and cultivating brand awareness

Stakeholders identified their primary goals for the festival site were box office sales and awareness of their year-round programming - they wanted people to know there was more to TIFA than the 11-day festival.

Adding to the design challenge was a change in box office formatting from single event tickets to festival passes. Additionally, TIFA was going through a rebrand in 2023, which meant their brand guidelines were completely up in the air at the start of this project.

OUTCOME

Increased user engagement

Empathizing with users landed us on a design that kept them engaged with more content on the website. Page views per session more than doubled from the previous year, while users spent more time looking at event pages.

The Toronto Star even took note.

Smoother box office journey

13% more users found it easy to purchase passes in 2023 than in the previous year. Moreover, there was a 5% reduction in users who experienced any difficulty completing their purchase.

STAKEHOLDERS

Everybody knows that UX lives where user needs overlap with business goals. There’s a Venn Diagram illustrating it perfectly right over there. My first objective was to speak with TIFA’s team to identify their priorities for the website, as well as to learn some existing insights about their users.

Box Office

As with every other festival promoter that has ever existed, TIFA wanted to sell tickets. Well, passes, actually. The previous year’s festival did decently by TIFA’s metrics, but they were shifting to a more pass-centric format this time to try to stimulate more regular attendance throughout the 11-day festival. This was a seismic change from years past where festivalgoers could purchase a single ticket for a single event.

Year-Round Awareness

Despite the scale of the flagship festival - hundreds of events, internationally acclaimed authors on the bill - it was important for TIFA to educate users on their year-round existence. They wanted to generate interest in their more grassroots programs like the Virtual Book Club, TIFA KIDS, and Toronto Lit Up, which puts on free events to help emerging authors launch their books.

PRE-EXISTING USER INSIGHTS

Observation and feedback collected after the previous year’s festival provided a great starting point for empathizing with TIFA’s users. There were two insights in particular that I wanted to explore:

1) People get excited about books

This might not seem all that groundbreaking, but it’s not called the Toronto International Festival of Books. TIFA primarily markets the authors that are coming to town for the festival, not their books. So, when TIFA shares this tidbit about festivalgoers, I can’t help but think of it in terms of engagement. Consider this set of thumbnails:

2) The printed schedule is a hit

Each festival TIFA prints out a brochure that has a full schedule on the back. It helps festivalgoers see everything at a glance and plan their visit.

Up until now, they had never attempted an online version of this schedule view, but it was something I wanted to explore given how useful people found it.

USABILITY SESSIONS - PARTICIPANTS

We were off to a solid start, but I needed to learn more about these people before making any design decisions. With TIFA’s permission, I began reaching out to people from their mailing list to look for participants for user interviews and usability testing.

It didn’t take long to get eight (8) participants on board, all of whom had been to the previous year’s festival. While this would invite some bias into our testing - they had all seen the website before - it allowed us to get testing sooner.

DATA PROCESSING & SYNTHESIS

I used an online tool to generate transcripts from each session. A glutton for tedious punishment, I then went through each one manually, highlighting quotes and adding notes for unspoken behavioral insights (eg. where a user would hover their mouse expecting something to happen.)

Finally, it was time for every UX Designer’s trademark moment in research - affinity mapping.

Pulled directly from the empathy map where we organize the resonant user attitudes and behaviours, below is a summary of the extracted themes and “How might we?” statements.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

With the full discovery portion of the process in the rearview, it was time to diverge once more and start cooking up some design ideas. This was the most challenging part of the project. As a “creative type”, I can be guilty of romanticizing about easily coming up with brilliant, beautiful solutions to all the problems we’ve discovered.

The reality is that it’s a slow, iterative grind, and for a new designer this was where the doubt started to creep in. “Is this going to work? Do I even know what I’m doing? I’ve barely read a single book this year - who am I to design a website for these scholars?”

This lonely designer imposter syndrome was compounded by the fact that I didn’t have the brand guidelines when starting the design phase. I would begin by using placeholder fonts, colours and style elements, knowing that they would likely need to be updated at some point in the process.

BARNBROOK

Barnbrook was hired to lead the new brand guidelines for Harbourfront Centre and TIFA. As I mentioned in the intro video, they have quite the impressive roster of clients for their design work, including the likes of Davie Bowie and John Lennon.

Once the brand guidelines were approved by TIFA, they were shared with me and I took to updating the wireframes accordingly. It was a lot of purple, which was the 2023 theme as part of an annual rotating palette.

Once the designs were updated with the new branding in mind, I met with the designers from Barnbrook to get their feedback. They provided me with a light style guide, outlining a few more colours to use, typeface guidelines, and some granular interface design rules.

If the end experience is going to be more valuable than the sum of its parts, the parts need to be well thought out. After getting the recommendations from Barnbrook, we were armed with everything we needed to launch the product. Here are the major parts under the hood:

The Impact

This site made it easier to buy festival passes, which was the primary business goal TIFA outlined in our very first chat

Barnbrook Collab

Implementing their brand guidelines went smoothly, and it was a unique opportunity for me to work with such skilled designers

Stakeholder Buy-In

Communicating with the TIFA team early and throughout the process helped establish trust and collaboration

Cross-Functional

Advising on the build and adapting to new challenges (eg. last minute tweaks to the Box Office page, rush launching the Schedule)

User Research

Research can be seen as a luxury if not a pipe dream in many organizations. Luckily we were able to run and convey its value with TIFA

Desktop First

There’s a good reason why every product designer has “Mobile First” tattooed somewhere on their body - it needs to be prioritized

Square Images

Many of the designs used 1x1 ratio images, which resulted in odd crops of many event photos because of their composition

What’s a template?

Designing each page on its meant little modulation, making the build less efficient and resulting in a less cohesive product

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

A post-mortem review of the festival site brought up most of the points outlined above. We then started working on the new version of the year-round TIFA site, iterating on some of the new festival designs.

A sneak peak at one of those iterations is pictured to the right - an event card template that features both the author image and the book they’re promoting. The TIFA User is gonna love it.