Funraiser Festival
A responsive website and app for a new annual music festival that raises funds and awareness for prominent causes.
Role
UI/UX Designer
Timeline
Dec 2024 - Mar 2025
Products
Website & App
OVERVIEW
Merging Fun with Fundraising
With the LA wildfires causing devastating damage to local communities, I took on the challenge of creating Funraiser — a festival brand built around fundraising. Every Funraiser-hosted event is designed to raise donations and awareness while keeping the spirit of celebration alive. With limited time and resources, I worked to design a community-centered experience that made supporting relief efforts both accessible and exciting.
Project Brief
Funraiser is a prototype annual music festival that raises funds and awareness for prominent causes.
For this year (2025), I built the festival website and app around the LA wildfires.
Goals
Designing a responsive festival website and app to:
Inspire users to engage with the meaningful causes spotlighted at each annual event
Improve navigation throughout festival grounds
Streamline ticket purchasing
Problem Statement
Young people want to support important causes but lack accessible ways to get involved, while traditional relief efforts struggle to engage them.
The Funraiser Festival offers a community-driven, culturally relevant approach that empowers youth to participate in fundraising through immersive experiences.
DISCOVER
Understanding the Audience
I had many questions coming into my research process:
What is our main target audience?
What would motivate our target audience to attend our festivals?
What type of content and features do our users want to see?
Research
User Research
To identify the target audience, I conducted 15 in-person surveys with individuals aged 18–35 and supplemented this with extensive online, data-driven research.
Competitive Analysis
I conducted a thorough analysis looking at other festivals with similar initiatives and focusing on these points:
Site Strengths/Pain Points
Unique Features
Target Audience
Customer Acquisition Methods
Affinity Mapping
Using the insights from my user research and competitive analysis, I created an affinity map to assist me in defining the key features for the Funraiser app.
DEFINE
Identifying Users & Features
Through my research, I gained a clear understanding of Funraiser’s website/app user demographic and behaviors. This helped me identify the target user’s goals and pain points, and behaviors.
Target Audience
Young California residents aged 18–35 with progressive values and a taste for pop, indie, R&B, and rap music.
Their main pain points are poor preparation and unsafe environments, and loneliness.
User Goals
Getting involved in supporting social causes and relief efforts
Seeing their favorite artists perform
Finding a community of like-minded people with progressive values so that they can feel a sense of belonging
Key Features
It became clear after categorizing the key features that the Funraiser website should focus on pre-festival planning, while the Funraiser app would serve as a navigation guide during the festival.
Website
Festival Planner
For users to cater the festival experience to their liking. A digital calendar with all the musicians & events for users to drag & drop over the timestamps.
Hotel Finding & Filtering
For users to find the best hotels near the festival at the best prices. Festival would ideally offer hotel discounts through hotel partnering efforts.
Fundraiser Cause Breakdown
That informs users of both the cause, and what we are doing to support the cause in our fundraising initiative.
App
Friend Adding & Messaging
To give users (festival attendants) a safe way of connecting and staying in touch with others.
Interactive map
To help users locate artists, events, and charging stations (connected to in-app festival planner)
Live Festival Videos & Updates
App will send push notifications to users based on their festival planner. The live videos save in an in-app archive page.
EXPLORE
Designing a Solution
User Flows
Flow 1: Ticket Search & Purchase
Flow 2: Add Friend + Message
Structure (Lo-Fi)
FINALIZE
Developing the Visual Identity
I knew that I wanted to make the UI minimal for testing and simplicity of use. In order to capture the festival energy without using gradients or patterns, I chose to use a vibrant sunset orange for the primary color of the UI and round the logo and web/app elements for a playful feel.
UI
Final Product
App Visuals
Home Screen
Splash Screen
Messaging
Buy Tickets
Festival Lives Archive
Add Friends
REFLECT
Key Takeaways
Prioritize features favored by target audience
Despite my extensive user research, I found from user testing that many users had an affinity towards the safety features of the Funraiser app and ultimately decided to highlight both types of features in my final product. Unexpectedly, both types of features aligned with my target audience, so I chose to adjust the app accordingly to cater to them.
Start small and build from there
During ideation and prototyping, I started trying to add fun features to the UI like adding friends via QR code at a very early stage. After taking a step back, I reminded myself to start with a simple UI for functionality and build from there. The more features and buttons I add to the UI, the more complicated the entire product becomes.