Steel City Wed | Wedding Planning App
The Pittsburgh wedding community is a tight-knit community that truly believes a rising tide raises all ships. There should be a tool to help them take this community to the next level. This is a wedding planning checklist app that is specific to the city of Pittsburgh. It includes all local vendors, local tips, and any local wedding flair. It also has a communication system for vendors to communicate with brides and fellow vendors.
The problem: Right now, there are many wedding checklist apps for couples and vendors, but none that really unites the concept of communication between the two and between vendors. All of those big-name apps also lack that personal feeling of getting married in your favorite city.
The goal: Create a place for seamless communication, planning, and Pittsburgh-specific tips for wedding planning, for vendors and couples to have cohesive planning and communication experience or the big day.
My role and responsibilities: UX/UI Designer, User research, wire framing, prototyping, testing, low/high fidelity prototyping, and design of final product.
From Wireframe to High Fidelity
There are two groups of people this app is targeting: couples and vendors.
The couples are people who live in Pittsburgh or have dreamed of getting married in Pittsburgh and are looking for wedding inspiration that is incredibly city-specific. They also are looking for a streamlined and organized experience.
The vendors are Pittsburgh-specific vendors (either located-in or travel-to) and are accepted into the system by application. They want to be able to communicate with their couples and also vendors working with those couples to have the most organized wedding experience.
The Takeaway
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I worked in the wedding industry for years. In college, I worked at Tim McLoone's Supper Club in Asbury Park. It was a blast. I looked forward to spending my weekends handing out champagne and little hors d'oeuvre on a plate to guests and taking part in one of the happiest days in someone’s life.
A few years later, after my own wedding, I launched a little stationery business and continued down the rabbit hole of the wedding industry. You can learn more about that here. All that to say, finding a solution for vendors and couples that allows them all to work in harmony and make the industry even better is my passion.
Being able to create an app for a city with so much personality and unique wedding quirks was a dream come true.
All in all, this was a fantastic way to learn more about UX/UI via the Google UX Certification course through Coursera and to tie it into a way that can make a positive difference in an industry. I mentioned it briefly in my introduction on this page (feels like forever ago, if you’ve made it this far), but a rising tide really does lift all boats in the wedding industry, and having a central hub to connect users is essential. A wedding is like a Broadway play, all parts have to work together in harmony to create something beautiful, and I only hope with this app I can help that happen more often.