Trill IRL

Building a community for local theater, music, food and comedy events.

Concept

Trill IRL brought social and community building patterns in concert with live show listings in a local region. We pitched the concept as rough wireframes at a quarterly meeting of our advisors.

Low fidelity

From there I facilitated a series of workshops where the team fleshed out specific features and flows using paper wireframes.

Research cadence

We put a weekly testing cadence in place inspired by Steve Krug’s concept of DIY usability testing — each Thursday we would dedicate a couple of hours to running 3-5 informal tests with users. Our offices were in lively coworking spaces with an ample supply of our target user, so recruiting often took the form of sending an intern down the halls to meet and greet. We picked a general focus for each week’s series and wrote a script so that anyone in the company could administer. On Fridays we held a post mortem and prioritized three things we could learn or fix from that week’s series. Depending on where we were in a product lifecycle, our tests ranged from surveys or freeform interviews to usability tests with either paper prototypes or live apps.

Mid fidelity

The visual design of the app developed in parallel. Here are some early concepts for a ranked list of events.

High fidelity

At this stage the app went into development with an external vendor. The branding for this iteration became the foundation of a TEDx installation later that year.