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.
Jitter
Anirevo boasts a distinct visual brand.
Since its conception in 2011, Anime Revolution has had ample time to establish a distinctly blue visual style. This is observed in its several print collateral that is situated across the venue during the annual event.
The visual appearance of the app is disconnected from the event’s distinct branding and rich history.
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.
a. Aligning the UI with Anirevo brand visuals
Despite 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.
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.
b. Evaluating & optimizing user flows
While 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.
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”.
c. Increasing scannability of event panels
Did 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.
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.
After