Kim Ku

Senior product designer at Wirecutter. See selected work or more about me.

WalkaboutNYC: Adding RSVP and personality to an event

WalkaboutNYC

Problem

For years, WalkaboutNYC was an open walking tour of NYC tech startups.

As we grew up and bigger, we needed a system to prevent overflow at our event spaces.

Challenge

We needed to create a system to help people reserve their spot on tour and also help participating startups prepare for visitors... with a very short deadline.

My role

  • Wireframed and designed interactions
  • Designed logo and branding
  • Developed illustration and CSS animations

Designing mobile first

Because people would spend most of their time using this site while walking around the city, designing mobile first was important to create a concise interface.

Showing only what we needed
There were two main goals for the user to accomplish here:

  • Browse the schedule and sign up for available time slots
  • View and use itinerary during the day of the event

Any extra visuals or interations would be left out of the mobile experience to optimize users to get what they needed fastest.

Wireframes

Test, design, and build
In the 2 years that I worked on Walkabout NYC, we would update it with improved visual treatments, but the foundation of interaction I outlined in the beginning stayed the same.

Mobile designs

Adding flare with the extra real estate on desktop

WalkaboutNYC was a fun and inviting event so there were moments to let that shine through on the desktop site.

Illustration and aesthetics
I created vector illustrations that organically made different levels of space for our content to flow into. They were meant to set a tone for the event and if you looked a little closer, you'd likely be able to find some funny easter eggs.

Homepage

My favorite: CSS animations!
One of the most memorable moments of delight on the site were the animations.

These gave me an opportunity to play with CSS and make something really fun.

They still make me 🙂.

Jumping corgi

Ladder swing

Falling date

Print design extras

This was a real-life event so I was able to design signage for our kickoff spaces and totebag swag for all our participants.

Signs, totes, and more signs
It was important to translate our WalkaboutNYC online experience to our in-person experience.

Swag

Learnings and lessons

  • After our redesign, we were able to guage how well our events went. We would usually sell out of seats in under a week!
  • With the success of this event, we created a similar one to explore NYC agencies
  • Through email feedback, we made improvements to the site like adding a pinned map and shareable itineraries
  • I wish we had more resources for improvements like adding startup logos to the maps page, exporting your route to Google maps, and adding more ways to create an account other than SSO
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