Iris Sun☀️



Redesigning the festival discovery experience for Philadelphia



Overview
DiasporaDNA is a mobile cultural center dedicated to archiving, celebrating, and activating Philadelphia’s diaspora communities. As Philadelphia approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, this project redesigned the Philly Festivals website, transforming it from a static listing into a more engaging, informative, and community-centered platform that reflects the cultural depth of the network.
    Info
    • Timeline:  Sep 2025 - Dec 2025
    • Team: Iris, Mengqi, Simran, Uraiba
    • My Role: User Interview, Competitive Analysis, Mobile & Desktop Redesign, Design system creation


    Demo of Philly Fests’ brand new site



    The problem with the current Philly Fest website
    The Philly Festival Discovery website, which is part of Diaspora DNA org, presented festival info mostly as long lists of links. No image, no introduction.
     Also, the homepage lacks context about its purpose, value, cultural storytelling, and DiasporaDNA’s broader vision for festivals as a community.

    We aim to redesign the website into a central hub that brings festival-goers and organizers together:
    • Easy for users to discover festivals. Highlight the cultural significance
    • Highlight the cultural significance of Philadelphia’s festivals
    • Better  support for the producers’ team


    Learning from the users through 5 research methods

    Festival-goers rely on multiple platforms to decide whether attending a festival is worthwhile, often lacking the clarity on attendance, social reassurance, and cultural context they need.

    Festival producers struggle with multiple tools to coordinate an event, while facing limited marketing budgets, making it difficult to reach audiences and tell their stories.

    Based on the pain points, we reclarified our research question:

    “How might we create a centralized cultural hub that supports local festival goers, producers, and tourists by providing trustworthy information, cultural depth, and inclusive accessibility?”


    Forming the project roadmap and prioritizing features
    With so many gaps to be filled and features to be created, we divided the development cycle into 3 phases, using RICE scoring. So that we can focus on the MVP for now.

      Phase 1: MVP Flywheel (Core)
      Building trust and repeat usage without requiring sign-ins:
      • Smart Discovery & Filters – Universal need, high impact
      • Festival Detail Pages – Foundation for trust
      • Schedule Builder – Unique differentiator from competitors
        Phase 2: Future Opportunities
        More advanced features:
        • Producer Portal – High impact but smaller user base
        • Social Coordination – Addresses #1 barrier but requires community
        • User-Generated Content – High engagement but moderation-heavy

        Phase 3: Monetization & Sustainability (Future Stage)
        After a large and active user base is established:
        • Ticketing Integration – Complex, low confidence
        • Marketplace – Out of scope for cultural mission
        • Exclusive offers


        Then we restructured the information architecture to make festival discovery the core experience,         which aligns with our phase 1 goal: making it easy for locals and tourists to discover festivals. And made a detailed plan on what exact features are we going to develop.

        New Information Architecture
        Project Plan



        Moving into the final MVP design          Prototype 

        1. Festival Discovery

        #2 Festival Details Page

        #3 Festival Lineup Experience

        #4 Producer’s Festival Submission Page
        #5 Design System for Consistency

        Design system (image, color, graphic, and typography)
        Components such as header, footer, and navigation bar


        Reflection
        What I learned 💁🏻‍♀️
        • The best design solutions emerge at the intersection of user needs and business constraints
        • How to balance the two different user groups (goers and producers)
        • Schedule Builder works because it delivers value to users (personalization without accounts) while solving a business problem (lead generation for producers)
        • Finding those win-win features is the mark of strategic design

        What we did well
        • All of our ideas are research-driven, making sure it really benefits the target audience
        • Using RICE prioritization to help us focus on MVP vs. “nice-to-haves” features
        • Feature innovation, such as Schedule Builder, a thoughtful filter system, producer form, and clear homepage design
        • Created a design system to keep everything consistent and adpts to varying content lengths
        • Strong collaboration with DiasporaDNA kept the cultural mission central

        What we could do better
        • Iterate more quickly and collect more student feedback
        • Think about the mobile version