ERIKA WANG


Anirevo Guide

Vancouver’s largest anime convention is celebrating its 14th year in the upcoming Summer of 2025. Seeing a 300% boost in attendees following its return from a 2-year break in 2022, they are currently experimenting with changes to its audience engagement approaches.
As part of their new approach, the event launched its own app - Anirevo Guide. However, in its 2024 year it only saw roughly 1000 downloads across the App store and the Play store combined. 

This app is an ongoing project that is to be launched in August 2025. I am currently in charge of a UI refresh as well as tweaks to the overall app user experience.
DurationSeptember 2024 - PresentToolsFigma
Jitter My RolesUX/UI Design









Overview of my contributions

What are some opportunities not being addressed through the mobile app?
To find a starting point, I conducted a heuristics evaluation and a scan of exisiting customer feedback, as well as informal interviews with past attendees of the event. Below are three recurring issues that I addressed.





Lack of cohesive flow between pagesWhile Anirevo Guide is successful in sourcing and displaying data from the convention, each page exists in isolation, and lacks visual cues that lay out a ‘path’ for the user.

Solution
To address the scattered sense of flow between each feature, I structured the app so that each page would nudge the user to the ‘My schedule‘ tab.

Not only does ‘My schedule’ have the biggest potential for building excitement towards the event, but during convention weekend, we anticipate attendees to be using this tab most frequently, aside from “map”.



Low tie-in with Anirevo brand visualsDespite Anime Revolution having distinct visual branding, the app does not take advantage of this - for instance, the ‘Anirevo blue’ that the organization uses across their other digital touchpoints is hardly seen in Anirevo Guide. 
Knowing that Anime Revolution is planning to expand to Toronto in November, this will be a problem for the app when they introduce their ‘Toronto purple’ branding.

Solution
By aligning elements such as fonts and primary colour palette to the existing website, I gave the app a sense of cohesion with the Anirevo brand.

I took creative liberties with certain parts of the app, such as the body font and illustration system, to prevent the app from feeling antiquated. This design system is currently being fed back into other digital touchpoints of Anime Revolution.

   



Little visual distinction between event categoriesDid you know that Anime Revolution has 12 different panel categories and 6 types of rooms that they could be hosted in? Currently, there’s no way of telling this on the Anirevo Guide - despite there being upwards of 160 panels each year.

Before
After
Solution
Sifting through the schedules is currently a cognitively heavy task as there are no visual cues to enable users to sift through the data, forcing them to skim through hundreds of event labels to pick events of interest.

I introduced a colour system to the ‘Schedules’ tab in hopes of increasing the scannability of panels.



Other key points in the app


Pre-plan & DiscoverEvoking excitement for the next event
The primary usage of this app will be for prospective event attendees to find panels they’d like to visit during the 3-day event. 

Browsing through the app, users will be able to view the chronological order of all the panels registered to the Anirevo database, and be able to build a personalized schedule containing all the events they are interested in seeing. 
Supplementary information
Finding guests: Who’s attending?
Currently missing from the app is a way to invite prospective attendees to get familiar with Anime Revolution in a way that differs from exploring the panels in a chronological order. 

The discover tab would allow them to find honoured guests from the animation industry and the panels they will be participating in.

Exploring the venue
Which rooms should I visit?

Another point that has been raised by current users of the app is the fact that the venue is difficult to navigate, especially for fans attending from other areas of North America. 

The app provides a map feature that prioritizes browsing based on information that users already have: room numbers and event hall keys.