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Background: With over 2,000 events sponsored or co-sponsored by the City of Chicago throughout the year, how do it’s almost 3 million residents find event information? The answer is – lots of ways, because there are many channels of information available to city residents. It can be daunting though to locate specific information or easy to miss events of interest since the cities’ 30 + city departments use several different ways to promote their individual events.
In this project, my 4 person DePaul collaboration team partnered with the City of Chicago's Department of Innovation and Technology to understand and improve the event experience for Chicago residents.
Goal: Enable city departments to promote their specific events in a centralized location utilizing existing platforms to provide residents event discovery and allow personalized search parameters with dynamic filtering.
Design Process included;
Interviews with key city department staff to understand process and channels used to promote events and their challenges with existing formats.
Surveyed residents to understand the variety of channels they used and preferred ways to access event information.
Card sorting exercises with residents to determined labeling for prototype and usability testing with both residents and key city stakeholders to finalize the interface designs.
Proposed Design Solutions included a CHI EVENTS web page that launches from the city’s website home page and event integration into the existing CHI 311 app. Both solutions feature event information from all city departments with filtering and calendar options.
These solutions are possible through use of the Chicago Data Portal. Our team developed an input document that all city departments could access to upload event information to the portal to allow it to be viewed on these platforms. This proposed solution ecosystem provides access to event information for residents that presently does not exist, providing increased transparency regarding events and allowing city departments to more effectively reach their intended communities.
CHI EVENTS home screen view
Event integration into the existing CHI 311 app utilizes ‘Near Me’ feature to easily locate events
Proposed solution ecosystem utilizing existing city platforms