Rally by Eventbrite
2016—2017
Eventbrite is the world’s leading online ticketing and event hosting space, with millions of users and event organizers. Throughout 2016, they'd been experimenting with new consumer-facing features through small user tests, and they were looking to bring these features to a larger audience to gather more quantitative data.
On contract with Odopod, I was brought in-house at Eventbrite to serve as the sole product designer on a small skunkworks team, turning these new features into a complete consumer product. In just four months, we designed, built, and launched a brand new event discovery and messaging app called Rally.
Rally was designed to serve as a public beta test of a handful of new product features to determine how they might fit into the core Eventbrite product. These included an algorithmic event discovery feed, personal group RSVP’s and messaging, “evergreen” events (like visiting a local museum), and private event creation for small groups of friends.
To begin, I immersed myself in Eventbrite’s new product design language and recently refreshed branding. We designed Rally to feel visually distinct from the Eventbrite orange-and-white color scheme, using the app as an opportunity to test new colors, styles, and visual treatments of UI components.
The Rally experiment ran for about six months while the team collected data. In the end, some features proved valuable (algorithmic discovery), while others were less successful (group messaging). However, one key aspect of the test that proved successful was the new design system I created for Rally, on top of the brand-new iOS app codebase the team built for the test.
I returned to Eventbrite after the test to work with the in-house product design team, turning the Rally design system and codebase into a new foundation for a refresh of the core Eventbrite app. I helped the team expand the design system, restyling our components using Eventbrite’s brand language, and adding new components for all the other consumer app needs, including ticketing and event checkout.
Timeline
4 months (initial development)
2 months (follow-up development)
Team
Product Designer
Product Manager
iOS Engineer
Back-End Server Engineer
Role
Product Designer,
Odopod
Each week, users would get a customized feed of new events, tailored to their interests.
The feed is designed to feel dynamic, with shifting colors based on event images.
Users could tune their recommendations by swiping away events that didn't match their interests.
At the core of the app are "rallies", a group messaging and RSVP system to help groups of friends coordinate and share events.
When searching for events, users can easily see which events have friends on the guest list.
Another key feature is event creation from within the app, designed for smaller events with friends.
User-created events show up in their friends' feeds as a special card with a personal message.
The app also offered event category hubs for additional discovery.