Day 11: Creating my first wireframe

Intro

For day 11, I was tasked with building a wireframe and familiarizing myself with the basics of Figma. I've been doing a lot of design and development lately, so I was excited to use today’s challenge as an opportunity to improve my skills through practice.

I'm familiar with Figma because I work on a software development team as a technical project manager. Recently, I've started creating templates in Figjam for our scrum ceremonies such as our daily standups and sprint retrospectives. However-this was my first time using Figma as a designer.

When you're starting out with any new tool, it can be intimidating—but I found myself quickly greeted by some excellent guidelines and templates in Figma's content library.

The Concept

I came up with this idea in part because of my love for the Fyre Fest documentaries. If you have seen both documentaries (which I have, many times), you might remember that Billy McFarland started several companies before he started the infamous Fyre Fest - one of which was a tinder like app designed to connect celebrity musicians with private event bookings.

Taking inspiration from the Fyre app (which was basically Tinder but for booking models and performers) I built a tinder swipe style app that allows event planners and entertainment professionals to create profiles and swipe through their own stack of potential matches.

In my experience as a pop culture event planner, I've found that guest recruitment can often be a time consuming, stressful and frustrating experience. It involves a lot of patience, but not too much patience, a lot of customer service and sales skills, and a lot of emails. A good guest lineup can make or break your attendance, so it's especially important to contact and follow up with talent when they're ready to book, but before someone else does.

In my time recruiting guests for appearances, I would have loved to have an easy to use application that would allow me to browse a list of talent professionals in my industry who have booking availability on my dates. Now that my cosplay circus troupe is actively looking to tour our show and debut our upcoming theatrical production inspired by demon slayer, I wish there was an easier way to put ourselves in front of and get in contact with events that might like to hire us.

The concept is simple. If you create an event profile, you can swipe through a list of professionals that are actively looking to book appearances on your dates. If you match, you get to exchange emails, talk about rates, and start working together. If you're an entertainer or speaker, you can create a profile that details the work you're best known for, as well as the types of programming you can bring to an event

Takeaways

Wireframes are helpful when designing apps and websites as well as more practical things like user interfaces or brochures; they're not just for graphic designers! - By seeing the layout ahead of time, we can make sure that all our content fits together nicely without any gaps or misalignments between elements (like text boxes). Wireframes can help us come up with a design that is more pleasing to the eye and easier to understand than just imagining it in our heads.

You don't need to be a designer or developer to use wireframes; anyone can make them. As long as you're thinking about how your content will be laid out, how users might interact with it, and what will happen when they do so, you'll be able to create some pretty useful wireframes on your own.