Juwenalia festival app

35,000 users with a 4.9 rating

Introduction

I led the design team on the mobile app redesign for Juwenalia Krakowskie, the largest student festival in Kraków. This year 35 thousand people used it during the festival.

The old app had no design files at all, so everything was designed from scratch. I was accountable for the whole product life cycle, from research to hand-off.

Mobile appFrom scratchTesting & iteration

What wasn't working

Unused features, friction, style and branding

Brief & workshop

The festival team wanted key features to be more visible and used.

Plus a clear information architecture, and a more playful style for the app.

Product audit

The whole team spent time with the app to understand how it worked.

Everyone landed on the same thing: a hard-to-find schedule, and needless friction along the way.

Usability testing

I observed users running tasks inside the app.

It confirmed my assumptions about a hidden schedule button, missing key features and friction along the way.

Key findings

Hidden schedule
Lack of key features
Needless friction

How I got there

Fundamental parts of my process in this project

Analysing the product

Turned the brief and the audit into one map of stakeholder goals and user needs.

That map set what a new version had to do.

Learning what to keep

The same testing sessions showed what already worked for users.

Those parts were carried into the new design rather than dropped.

Defining the scope

Turned the findings into problems to solve and goals to achieve.

Agreed with the PM and engineers, so it was shippable in time.

Exploring solutions

Explored several IA variants, homepages and schedule layouts.

Built the strongest ones out as interactive prototypes.

Testing & iterating

Tested with students and iterated on the layouts that didn't hold up.

Each round cut the weaker variants until one clearly performed best.

Design system & hand-off

Shipped the final screens and the design system.

Walked engineers through it and stayed on until it was live.

What could fix it

Considered options that would solve our problems

Homepage, the previous version

Pros

  • One news card at a time, nothing competing for attention

Cons

  • Only a news feed, and the first card alone fills most of the screen
  • No shortcuts to zones, events or the schedule from the home screen
  • The schedule button only appeared on scroll, in the same colour as the background behind it

What shipped, and why

Clear, intuitive and playful style solution

The shipped homepage. News, zone tiles and upcoming events
The shipped zone screen for Plaża. Directions, map and filters
The shipped schedule. One row per zone, scrolling sideways

Why these solutions?

  • We tested every option with target users, then chose and iterated based on their feedback and results.
  • The festival hub homepage worked best and offered the most valuable features.
  • The schedule got its own tab in the navbar, one tap away from any screen.
  • The horizontal schedule made every festival event easy to browse, and it both performed and rated best.
  • Users missed the filters among the action buttons, so we split them into a clearer layout and shipped it.

What changed

The results and what I delivered

4.9from 35k usersAverage rating across all devices.
75%found it more intuitiveInternal student research with users of last year's app.

What I delivered

  • Every app screen and 7+ user flows, with every edge case and error state
  • A design system of 60+ components for engineers
  • Led the design team and kept PM and engineering in sync
  • Shipped everything before the deadline, working closely with engineering through the last round of testing
Next caseCheckout flow redesign