Plots Streamlining a growing event platform

Plots is shifting the narrative of social platforms away from doom scrolling and towards in-person connections. Their mobile app is a convenient way to discover nearby events, attend them, and stay connected to the people you meet.

I joined the Plots team at 70,000 users. In close collaboration with developers, I solved complex UX problems by balancing user needs with technical constraints. We regularly shipped updates that enhanced usability and cohesion across the entire user journey. As a result, my design work removed critical UX roadblocks and improved the Plots brand experience, clearing the way for continued growth.

How I fostered empathy

To understand our users better, observing and listening to them was a priority. I took initiative to immerse myself in their world, which helped uncover findings that informed my design process.

Recording a user going through ticket checkout

My first Plots event

Watching our VP of growth spin the decks

I learned that event hosts organize multiple events simultaneously, and that it’s easy to lose track of the moving parts. As a result, hosts gravitate to whatever platform offers the most intuitive and comprehensive solution.

What makes attendees tick is the excitement and curiosity of discovering new events. However, Plots users mainly see the app as a way to buy tickets, and less of a social platform or way to discover events.

Social feature design sprint

I conducted a 7-day, end-to-end, solo design sprint to imagine a more social Plots user experience. I did research to generate a cohesive product strategy, created user flows, then designed a complete set of UI mockups.

Design goals:

Create an enhanced interface that utilizes people as a mechanism to highlight relevant events.
Incentivize event attendees to promote events by drawing them into a reward system.
Give users meaningful, productive functions that they value and interact with daily.

I budgeted one day for research, which I spent analyzing Plots’ social media content, conducting three user interviews, and analyzing my own experiences with using the platform. I uncovered findings that drove my process and sat at the foundation of every design decision.

Plots the feature, and Plots the app

At the heart of the concept is the Plots feature, which works like a playlist, but for weekend plans. Users create Plots for a specific day and invite friends to join the Plot. Then, anyone can add events for the group to attend.

Plots are flexible containers that facilitate and promote group plans to go out. They allow for multiple events and don’t place an upper limit on people.

High-fidelity mockups of key screens

With Plots, people take precedence over events because of my finding that people are usually more committed to people than specific plans. The functionality of Plots reflects the nature of evening plans: people first, and event(s) subject to change.

This feature enhances the brand experience with a central mechanism that’s unique, aligned with the core mission, and named after the product itself. The Plots app is not just about finding events, but it’s also about bringing people together.

Gamified invites

I created a gamified referral system to incentivize long-term use and drive more attendees to events. The system rewards users for successful invites through their own Plots, making it easy to attribute ticket sales to users without them doing any extra work. Not only that, but it also promotes the use of the product’s central feature.

Kandy is rewarded for each successful invitation. It is used to purchase coupons that are redeemable at events. XP is also rewarded, which increases the user’s VIP level, unlocking permanent perks at all events. This two-pronged system incentivizes prolonged use of the app and promotes brand loyalty while offering short-term rewards to keep users happy.

Kandy is exchanged for enticing vouchers in the Kandy Shop. VIP 1 users can only get ticket discounts, but as users level up their VIP Rank, they unlock increasingly valuable vouchers.

Despite this concept’s emphasis on engagement, the ultimate goal is still opening the door to in-person experiences. The product benefits from bringing people together, not from keeping them glued to screens. People, not content, are the true currency and their connections are what drive every function.

Event Discovery

An event’s name, description, and flyer, combined with the host’s social media page, are the industry standard. However, I learned that when people think about going out in the future, they think about who they might meet. Therefore, the industry standard is not compelling enough because it fails to embrace people’s thought processes.

I redesigned the event discovery experience from the ground up by incorporating findings from my research. Whereas the current version of event discovery is map-driven, I experimented with a more information-focused direction. The event discovery UI in this concept utilizes guest lists to highlight the largest upcoming events.

The For You is a powerful filter that surfaces events that friends are attending and recommends events for the user’s upcoming plots. Overall, the filters afford an expedited event discovery process, catering to users who are already out for the night but don’t have plans. This is directly tied to my finding that people tend to let the night take them where it will.

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed provides updates on friends' activity, events, and nearby plots. By channeling the finding people think about who they might meet, the activity feed indirectly uses people to surface events and gives users an exciting reason to add more friends and check the app daily.

Product Strategy

In this concept, all features coalesce into an engaging and immersive social experience that’s just as much about people as it is events. As a result of my research to understand needs, I created a concept that would be equally valuable to both the business and the users.

The features address an array of user needs and create positive feedback loops that promote the continued growth of the user base.

Next steps

If given a chance to bring my concept to reality, I would first test the Activity Feed by incorporating it in the production app. Since the Activity Feed is a social feature intended to provide daily value, it may counteract our users’ perception that Plots is not a social platform. After releasing an MVP version of the Activity Feed, I would use engagement as a success metric and work with engineers to configure analytics.

I would also solicit feedback about the Plots function and referral system from promoters, event hosts, club owners, and a range of users. Feedback from club owners would be especially important since the Kandy shop offers drink discounts, which may cut too deeply into a club’s profit margins. Additionally, the Kandy rewards may not resonate with users, and the Plots function may not align with promoters’ existing workflows.

Empathy for user needs drives great product design, and I would need more to ensure my ideas are truly valuable to the people I am trying to serve.

Increasing trust with transparent payouts

Our team received near-constant feedback that hosts were confused about when their revenue would land in their bank account, causing unnecessary frustration.

Since event hosts tend to choose a platform that offers the most intuitive and cohesive solution, ensuring a smooth payout experience was vital to Plots’ continued growth.

I tackled the issue by designing a new section of the app called “Payouts” that afforded hosts control of their finances without compromising simplicity and visual appeal.

diagnosing the problem

Plots uses Stripe to manage financial logistics. Upon investigating the Stripe accounts of the hosts who messaged us, we noticed that all of their payouts were paused because of easy to fix problems like uploading an ID.

Our app minimized interactions with Stripe by hiding Stripe after users link an account. However, this set-it-and-forget-it approach was backfiring because it only accounted for the happy path.

By not accounting for Stripe-related issues, our app left users without a clue why payouts had abruptly stopped.

design approach

To prevent payout pauses, users needed to be proactively alerted of any Stripe issues, but users also needed to see payout at a glance. The solution was simple: take everything users can see on their Stripe page and put it in Plots app. Since hosts do almost all their event management through our app, financial details should be situated there as well.

The real challenge was designing a interface that balanced user needs with range of other caveats and variables. Verified hosts and unverified hosts received payouts on different schedules, and there were four possible states of a user’s Stripe: connected, not connected, issue, or paused.

Technical constraints also arose and required close collaboration with engineers. Together, we defined three custom APIs to call information from Stripe that made the design feasible.

Designing a dynamic UI

The result was a new page in the Plots app that enhances payout visibility. It was designed for hosts managing multiple events and displays payout information for all events combined.

Our custom APIs made the integration of data from Stripe feel natural. They also powered alerts that call out specific issues with Stripe and prompt hosts to resolve those issues.

A payout schedule keeps hosts in the loop, allowing them to plan accordingly. A display of the payout method shows where money is going and includes an option to change it if needed.

Other features I designed

ticket purchase flow

revamped onboarding

enhanced host dashboard

Important hosting functions were situated in unintuitive places that required extensive navigation.

The redesigned hosting dashboard places those functions on the same page where events are created and managed.

Seven Day Design Sprint

Redirecting platform growth

Since Plots events can be shared through the web, downloading the app isn’t required for attending events, so most users never did.

It turned out that offering a discount at checkout persuades many users to get the app and finish checkout there.

However, that process was lengthy and redundant. So, I made it easy to start a checkout on web, then finish it on the Plots app after downloading it.

Web -> Mobile Ticket Checkout

By allowing users to seamlessly resume checkout after signing in, I removed 6+ clicks from this flow.

After buying tickets, users can invite friends to the event and earn cash if those friends attend. We included event promotion in this process to test whether it would result in more mobile users.

App store onboarding redesign

Aside from an updated aesthetic, the redesigned onboarding includes a new prompt to add a college. By verifying students during onboarding, we ensure that they aren’t blocked from seeing view college-only events – which are central to Plots’ growth strategy.

Key Takeaways

Focus on what matters

Plots’ short runway, coupled with the high bar for consumer products, created a narrow path for success. These constraints taught me to determine when to produce rough wireframes versus polished UI designs, and that avoiding getting lost in details is key to working effectively in fast-paced environments.

Move fast and make things

In early-stage startups, everything is an experiment. Without product analytics set up, I relied on confidence to make design decisions and got comfortable shooting from the hip. I learned that when a team is getting a product off the ground, done is better than perfect.

Be specific

I worked with remote developers, which presented communication challenges. This experience taught me a valuable lesson: to ensure your designs are accurately reflected in the build, leave nothing open to the developer's interpretation.

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