Designing an event-planning app through user research
An all-in-one app to plan private events — guests, tasks and budget in one place.
Organizing a private event is often a source of stress: scattered tools, tricky coordination between guests, and chaotic budgets. Brio brings it all into a single app — create an event, invite people, split tasks and track spending in real time. The whole design was driven, end to end, by user research.
Design an intuitive app that makes organizing private events — birthdays, holidays, parties — genuinely simple.
Three problems to solve:
Fragmented tools — how to bring every essential feature into a single app?
Coordinating people — how to distribute tasks and communicate smoothly?
Budget and spending — how to give a clear view of costs to avoid oversights and unfair splits?
One app instead of a patchwork of chats, spreadsheets and notes.
Brio lets users create an event, invite participants, collaborate on the organization and track expenses in real time — turning a stressful, scattered process into a single shared space.
Start from real needs. Five face-to-face interviews to understand motivations and pain points.
From insights to features. Personas, an experience map, feature ideation with the Lotus Flower method, then card sorting to prioritize.
Structure before screens. An information architecture that keeps a feature-rich app legible.
Sketch fast, decide well. The 6-to-1 method — ten minutes to draw six screens, then merge the best ideas into one.
Confront the design with reality. Eight scenarios, four users, an observation grid — then turn frictions into fixes.
From lo-fi to hi-fi. A clean, modern interface with clear breadcrumbs and simple user flows.
An all-in-one platform for guests, tasks and budget; built-in collaboration with task-splitting, messaging and notifications; and real-time expense tracking with automatic, fair cost-sharing.