Launch date: Aug 10, 2023

Live at: partyplease.co

Role: Lead developer, UX designer

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CONTEXT

PartyPlease is an extremely fun product, and was one of the most fun to design & build. Despite it's relatively simple approach, a fair amount of complexity had to go into PartyPlease's management system in order for everything to run smoothly. We built this product in 6 weeks, meaning we started the stopwatch at the first wireframe. I carried some of my failures with me from SIID over to this project and it is now our most successful portfolio company.

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PartyPlease is beautiful and simple, but it didn't start this way. With a design language that is driven by its products, it was a long road to achieve the final design of the homepage.

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CHALLENGES

The challenges with this build were less technical and more related to identifying product market fit. We invested considerable resources designing and building a two-sided marketplace for party hosts and party vendors, only to find out that the majority of hosts want their party planned for them. We pivoted slightly during the final third of our development cycle and focused on the vendor management software, curated parties and improved communication between both sides of the marketplace.

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When PartyPlease launched, our homepage was also its search engine, putting emphasis on hosts exploring different vendors by city. I had originally thought that hosts would want to explore and book options themselves, and furthermore that filtering by location wouldn't be that hard. I was wrong about pretty much all of that.

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Without preselected cities, the filtering became too general. Any search needed to be within 100 miles of any given major city in order to yield results. This paired with user research that suggested hosts want their parties planned for them drove the pivot.

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Our restructuring and emphasis on the vendor experience within the platform led to a grander update to our design system, letting the products stand out. Rather than landing a user on this search page, I built a new home page to emphasis pre-built parties, suggested products and popular categories (see first image).

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Removing location services from the mix was critical. Our revenue and booked parties increased by 1400% in our first month after launching our v2 of the search engine and homepage. Styles weren't the only thing we updated; the checkout and product discovery processes were brand new.

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The original product page was a popup rather than a dedicated page, and included so many different parameters in order to add a product to your cart. The vendor needed to be available, delivery needed to be determined, and the options were too constrained. By virtue of how hard this was to engineer, I should have assumed that this would be a cumbersome process for hosts and vendors alike.

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The new product page got rid of everything. Rather than putting pressure on both user types, we now employ an intermediary party planner to run communication between all party members and find similar products that might suit the hosts needs. The user testers revealed that sometimes less is more.

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LEARNINGS

As a new designer and developer, I had a natural tendency to over-design or engineer a product. This was a great lesson in listening to user feedback and the output of effective user research. PartyPlease is an example of every team member giving their absolute most for a project, and that all started with the founder. Molly was not afraid to dive into the product and get her hands dirty, and that inspired all of us to put our best foot forward and build an amazing product. For a moment it looked like we were a sinking ship, but effective design-thinking and smart pivots have made PartyPlease my fastest growing company to date.

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