Project Beta: Showing Value and Opportunity for Improvement with Historic Athens Porchfest

Project Overview:

For our Beta, we had a slightly different outcome than some students. We had to start our project in early October, so our goal for the Beta was to provide light wireframes of our Prototype, to show our research and where we plan to provide value to Porchfest, and talk about our next steps going forward.

The Problem

Historic Athens Porchfest has a couple of issues that we are trying to show in this Beta. One general problem is people understanding how to plan their day for Porchfest. There are over 260 bands at Historic Athens Porchfest, so it can be very overwhelming trying to plan your day. Another problem they run into is matching bands and porches. Currently, they have a Google form and sheet that they use to match bands and Porches, and we hope to be able to improve upon that process. Finally, we hope to help with their media storage and content production to create a cohesive social media and brand experience.

The Solution

Our solution for helping them with planning was a quiz feature on their website. This quiz feature would use the inputs from the matching process to create a porchfest itinerary of sorts. We are in talks on the best way to do this, but there have been several ideas floated around, such as having users create logins to save their itinerary, creating the quiz in an external site, and somehow linking to it the main Historic Athens Porchfest site. We hope that through this to also improve the band and porch intake form to make both the quiz feature and matching feature easier. Lastly, we hope to use a service like SmugMug to keep their media neat and organized.

Results

We were able to take these solutions and put them into our Beta presentation, which we will give later this week. I think we will do a nice job of explaining to an unfamiliar audience the opportunity presented to us to help Porchfest improve, the research we did to see how to improve, and on plan to execute the findings from our research. We hope to continue to work with Historic Athens next semester so that by April, we have a sound product and plan for Historic Athens Porchfest 2026.