Making It Easy to Find Party Clowns in Your Area

Project Overview 🔍

This project is a fun design game from Kak Luthfi Eryando (Interaction Designer at Gojek.) See the original Twitter post here. I called it the "Party Clown Challenge." I joined this game because I wanted to practice my product thinking and user interface design skills.

Background

In Indonesia, there are a lot of advertisements put on electric poles, one of those advertisements is for Party Clowns that you can hire for your parties. But, during the pandemic, the Party Clown profession got hit pretty badly. No one went out to see the ads on the electric poles, and the number of jobs they received was severely reduced. Now that parties are allowed again, let's make it easier for people to find and hire Party Clowns.

Problem Statement

1. It is hard for people to find a trustworthy Party Clown in their area.
2. During the pandemic, it feels unsafe to invite a "stranger" inside someone's house.
3. Party Clowns' services are not well known by the customers.

Challenge

The challenging thing for me about this project is that I'm not familiar with a party clown service and I don't know the customers who use this service. So it will be difficult to understand the problem thoroughly and provide an immediately effective solution. I also only have 7 days to complete this project.

Design Process 💠

Understand the goal (Why)

According to the problem statement above, the goal is to

1. Make people easy to find a trustworthy Party Clown in their area.
2. Make people feel safe to invite a Party Clown inside their house during the pandemic.
3. Increase awareness of Party Clowns' services.

Define the audiences (Who)

A Party Clown is hired to liven up a party. What kind of party? For who? There are several categories of audiences that come to mind. For children and adults. For children, it may be a party for their birthday or for an event at their school. But the person who will hire a party clown is not the child itself, but the parents or maybe an event organizer. For adults, it might be a corporate celebration party, fundraising event, family holiday party, or wedding event.

Here I will focus on parties for children. This means I want to help parents or an event organizer find and hire a party clown. They are most likely 25 years old and over from the middle-upper class.

Image from The LetsPlay Family YouTube channel

Understand the customer's context and needs (When & Where)

To understand the context and customer needs, I also have to understand Party Clowns themselves. I did some secondary research to help empathize with customers and Party Clowns.



The information that I found after doing the research are:

• Types of Party Clown services (magic clowns, character clowns, etc.)
• Party Clown business model (usually the price is per package with a duration of approximately 1 hour)
• Things that customers need to consider before booking Party Clown services

They need party clown services when their child's birthday or school event is coming up, a few days or weeks before D-Day. If the event is planned, I think there's plenty of time to book a party clown. If it's sudden, the customer needs quick time to book the party clown.

Parents might want to discuss this with their birthday child first before booking the services of a party clown. What kind of party clown do they want for the party? Magic clown? Party clown who dress like their favorite character, Batman? Parents might feel nervous and excited when booking a clown party because they want to give the best birthday party to their child.

Some things that parents might need to consider before booking the services of a party clown

1. Event date and time
2. Event location
3. Estimated number of children
4. Estimated number of adults
5. The age range of children
6. Children with disabilities

Ideation (What)

How might we make it easy for customers to find a trustworthy Party Clown in their area?

Perhaps the most common idea is to build a service booking application such as Uber or Gojek. Customers can find these services based on their nearest location. Most people are familiar with such service-finding applications. The experience of finding and renting services based on the nearest location is usually done on a mobile platform by utilizing the location feature on their smartphone. To make customers trust their services, they can see reviews or ratings from previous customers who have used these services. Also, we can add sample videos and photos of their services on the Party Clown profile.

How might we make customers feel safe to invite a Party Clown inside their house during the pandemic?

An informational badge on the profile of a Party Clown might assure customers that the Party Clown has been vaccinated, is negative for Covid-19, and actively practicing health protocols.

How might we increase awareness of the Party Clowns' services?

Perhaps customers can share their experiences of hiring Party Clown services on social media. Then customers can refer Party Clowns to their friends or family. So they get vouchers or discounts. Or, a party clown could appear in public, probably as a campaign to keep wearing masks and following health protocols.



Wireflow





Key brand value

What do I want users to feel about this product?

1. Fun. Because this application is intended for the search for Party Clown services. This can be achieved by choosing a friendly color, typeface or copy.
2. Trustworthy. So that parents don't need to be anxious and nervous in choosing the services of a Party Clown.
3. Kid-friendly. Maybe parents ask their children to find the services of the Party Clown they want.

Typography

After determining the brand value to be achieved, now choose a suitable typeface to support the key brand value.

I chose Nunito because the typeface looks rounded, which adds a sense of friendliness. There are also other alternatives like Muli or Brandon Grotesque.





Color

Vivid, primary colors evoke feelings of happiness and fun. I don't choose too many primary colors because I think the profile photo of the Party Clown will be very colorful later on.



Final design

These are some of the main final designs:









Prototype

Try it yourself here.

Conclusion ✨

This solution is limited to finding party clown services for kids' birthday parties for parents.

There are still many aspects and corner cases that need to be considered from a user and business perspective such as what if the party is for adults? What if the user doesn't find a party clown in their area? What if the user doesn't find a suitable party clown availability schedule? What if the party clown can't come to the party location? How to prevent crimes that may happen to children?

If I had more time and resources, I would do more research on the customer and the party clown itself. I want to understand customer habits as well as the business side of the party clown.