The festival was founded in 2016 and is a 1-day festival which takes place twice a year on Ibiza. Their mission statement is to celebrate life and they are embracing the following:

In my opinion, their current website does not invite for a visually pleasing experience. Therefore, I took on the challenge to redesign the current website in a 5-day design sprint following these 5 steps in order to succeed.

Who am I designing for? I started my qualitative research by sending out a short survey within the Ibiza Spirit Festival Facebook group and similar Facebook groups that would have a comparable target audience. I formulated questions that were heavily related to information architecture and visual elements.

The vision got clearer once the first responses came in — the general target user is 34 years old and has a full-time job. The users confirmed within the survey that there is no need for such vibrant colors when it comes to a spiritual festival website. Based on the users' feedback I formulated a new project brief for myself in order to stay on track.

You will be covering a series of roles to make sure you deliver a high-quality project:

- Market, Trend, and User Researcher

- Interaction Designer

- Art Director

- Motion Designer

- UI Designer (we will be practicing up to dev hand-off this week)

You need to have every asset ready by Friday, as the front-end developer needs to start on Monday. You’ll have the weekend to apply changes.

The client is asking for a microsite with a one-year life cycle — it will be stored in the main platform’s archive after this period. The marketing team has defined three stages of use:

- Pre-event

- During the event

- Post-event

The website should include all the information for this edition and links for the community. Ticket sale is a plus — if not possible within the scope, you can integrate a third-party service. The client wants to see your work in a meeting on Friday and all the C-Suite is invited to attend. The same day they have organized a meeting with the Dev Team to revise the documentation you’ve prepared.

Before I dived deep into the project, I re-wrote the project brief that was given to me by Ironhack Berlin, simply to make it clearer what needs to be done during this weeks' design sprint. I started to formulate a few questions with the goal to be able to answer all of them by the end of the week:

What am I trying to achieve?

How will I know the project is a success?

What do I need to do?

What are the must-haves?

Who am I doing this for?

To get a feel for the spiritual sphere I started to analyze what is out there. I looked into different directions to get a clearer picture: Yoga Festival websites, Meditation Festival websites and Spiritual Festival websites in general which are combining a lot of different areas of spirituality.

When comparing competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities I highlighted areas that I wanted to draw attention to and which were aligned with my users' feedback from the survey. As seen above a “spiritual website”, does not necessarily need to contain vibrant colors, but can contain a pale color palette. My requested users confirmed this repetitively throughout the research phase.

During the inspiration phase and whilst creating my mood boards, one thing was clear from the get-go:

My inspiration board shows my vision of what the Ibiza Spirit Festival might look like in the future. I used Pinterest for inspiration, and instead of letting ideas get lost by just having one single board, I created several boards dedicated to specific colors, typography, and shapes. I’ve tried to pay attention to all design elements that are important for a successful brand — which I have learned in-depth during my first UI solo project about the world-known brand Uber. After putting everything together on a mood board, I came up with the new brand attributes of the Ibiza Spirit Festival:

Many people cannot imagine how mid-fi wireframes become a prototype, except they are working in the UX/UI field themselves. Showing a mi-fi wireframe on a screen is fine, but it’s always best to see a first version of the hi-fi design to conduct desirability tests.

I started developing hi-fi mockups on the second day of the design sprint so that I can find out early on in which direction I have to go with the final design.

I asked people to share their thoughts whilst browsing so I knew what they were thinking as they interacted with the mockups. The adjectives used during the desirability test were extremely important as 50% of the users liked the 1st design (displayed on the far left), and the other 50% preferred the 2nd design (displayed as the second from the left). The first design was described as relaxing, summery, festival vibe whereas the second design was described as exclusive, connection, pricey.

Keeping my brand attributes in mind, the feedback validated going ahead with the 1st design so that I could finalize the project.

Once the prototype was finalized I created a style guide and a Zeplin file for a smooth handover to the development team.

A redesign of an already existing website can be quite challenging as your audience has to familiarize with and accept the new design. On the other hand, the potential of a redesign is immense in order to attract a wider audience. To sum it up, my learnings are:

1. Listen closely to the words people use to describe your design.

2. Stick to the design your users choose and not to the design you prefer.

3. Prepare an immaculate style guide for the development team so that no further questions arise.