Project Overview
The Telstra Perth Fashion Festival (TPFF) is one of Australia’s premier fashion events. The Festival celebrates the work of local, national and international designers across a week long program of fashion events. Now in its 17th year, the Festival installed a theme of “technology in fashion” to enhance the experience of guests attending the 2015 event. Employing the latest advances in technology, Alive worked with the Festival to develop a event companion app across android, iOS and Apple Watch devices.
Project Commissioner
Telstra Perth Fashion Festival
Project Creator
Team
Jorja Leroy
Lisa Cornofsky
Kristin De La Fuente
Ronald Huynh
James Pang
Project Brief
Telstra, the Festival’s naming sponsor, engaged Alive to develop a mobile first solution to improve the way guests plan, attend and interact with the event. The objective was to simplify the experience for guests, making it more appealing, opening up the event to new channels; broadening the Festival’s appeal (beyond industry members and VIPs) to audiences that exhibit a keen interest for fashion and design.
Alive began the engagement by interviewing organisers from TPFF to understand what challenges the Festival experienced promoting the event in previous years, and what techniques could be used to increase attendee numbers. A summary of the challenges and opportunities were collated and reviewed to establish the best way mobile technology could be employed to promote, attract and engage a broader audience of guests to the Festival.
It was agreed upon that an event companion app, which simplifies the way guests access, review and manage Festival information was the most appropriate solution to attract new attendees. The multi-platform app, provides guests with detailed event information, designer profiles, booking capability, and a personalised event calendar that can be curated to reflect a guests chosen schedule of events.
Project Need
The TPFF app represents an innovative first for the local fashion industry. Never before has a dedicated companion app been made available for guests attending Australian fashion events. Hard copy event programs and websites (with varying degrees of mobile compatibility), are hard pressed to compete with the personalised, user friendly offering made available to Festival guests mobile devices.
Focused on bringing the dynamic worlds of fashion and technology closer together, the app enables Festival guests to:
Explore over 40 free and ticketed events:
- Review program of over 40 fashion events and add them to their personal in-app planner or calendar
- Use interactive maps to explore the amazing Windows of the City (pre-event campaign) and find the way around each of the venues
- Buy tickets to the ticketed events
Meet over 30 of WA's talented designers:
- Read about each of the designers showing at TPFF
- Find out which event is showing the latest collections
Venue information
- Find out about what’s going on around the TPFF 2015 venues
Create a personal planner
- Add events to a personal in-app planner or calendar
- Receive notifications of event updates
Further enhancing the unique claims of the project is the apps syndication to wearable technology. The team extended the ‘MyPlanner’ functionality to Apple Watch devices. Guests can receive reminders of upcoming events; view their personal event program and review directions to Festival venues.
User Experience
Alive are a user-centric, design-led mobile development firm. We work closely with our clients to understand, identify and prioritise opportunities where mobile technology can be used to improve the experience of users. Taking a design-led approach promotes collaboration with our clients; we sketch, test and iterate ideas to develop a solution that aligns with the requirements of the business and the people who use the technology.
The approach was no different with TPFF. Our team sat down with Festival organisers to understand the personas of Festival guests; traditional attendees (industry, media VIP etc) and broader channels they aspired to attract. This process was important as it helped us to identify the behaviours and nuances of each user group, which informed the feature selection, hierarchy and navigation of the app.
The core features: Events; Designers and MyPlanner are located on tab navigation at the bottom of the screen and permit guests to easily search, review and select events. A circular, floating action button, was included in the Event and Designer profile screens, permitting streamlined access to MyPlanner, user calendars, social channels and the Festival’s booking agent.
The composition of colours, images and text was an important consideration to ensure the essence and quality of the Festival was captured and brought to life though the app. Working with TPFF’s corporate colours, a primary palette of black, copper and pink was employed to create a rich, sophisticated look that invites the eye of the user.
Project Marketing
Marketing efforts focused on the Festival’s official program launch that took place in July 2015. Organisers introduced the app in an activation that saw several models carry tablet devices, as a means of demonstrating the Festival’s desire to deploy innovative technology “in the hands” of guests. Stimulating excitement amongst the crowd of industry and media guests, news of the app was mentioned in local and national press publications that covered the Festival launch.
The app was also promoted through City of Perth’s Windows of the City competition: a consumer art installation campaign that ran prior to September’s Festival. Users who downloaded the app were able to review profiles of each installation across the competing retailers and access instructions on how to locate and view the artwork.
Importantly, the app will continue to evolve and enhance the experience of Festival guests courtesy of Alive’s 4 year partnership with TPFF. Learnings and insights from the 2015 event will be recorded and be reviewed in parallel with technological advances to establish methods to continuously improve the app.
“We see the mobile app extending into some very exciting areas over the next 4 years, and look forward to an innovative, inspiring and rewarding partnership with the Telstra Perth Fashion Festival.”
Luke Harvey-Palmer, Alive CEO
Project Privacy
Once launched, Alive has a strict privacy policy in place to ensure all online middleware and data collected via client applications is stored and managed securely. Furthermore, each customer will employ their own privacy policy that determines the conditions of use for customer data and information collected through the mobile application for use by their organisation.
FashionTech
FashionTech is changing the way fashion does business, disrupting the traditional relationships between consumers, brands and garments. They are creating a faster and more innovative ways to shop, market, educate and ultimately experience the fashion. This is the place for all those with a fashion connection.
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