OCAL - Sandeep Tripathy

Role: UX Designer / Web Designer

The Background

Odia Cultural Association London (OCAL) – a cultural association of Odia diaspora that has been functioning for the last 10 years and organizes various cultural festivals and events in the UK. The festivals are traditionally related to the Odia culture and primarily caters to the same community who wish to celebrate their heritage while living in an international location. One of the major highlights of the organization has been its events.

Research process

Initially, the chief of members reached out to me with a quick brief where he highlighted the need for a website to be created for OCAL focusing on a few features. In a quick chat as well as my earlier experience (I had attended one of their events in 2015), I could understand the primary activities of the organization. The events are majorly attended by several people, majorly families which is not limited to members only but also several other people (non-member participants). Hence the regular event participants include members as well as non-members.

In order to further understand the needs & expectations of the participants, I conducted a survey along with a few one-to-one interviews. The survey was supposed to target important functions of OCAL and questions were all formed around it. This brought clarity to a few aspects –

Participant centric

The members clearly wanted the website to be more targeted towards serving the purposes of participants (member and non-members included)

Events

This was highlighted as a major aspect of the website.

Outreach

An increase in exposure was also highlighted as an important aspect as the existing members wanted to reach out to more members of the community in the UK in order to drive more participants to the events.

Further, it was figured that online event booking including online payment features for events was something that the users wanted as that would make things more organized & easier as well. As of now, the event organizing process was being handled manually which resulted in delays and confusion.

To sum up, the main points that were inferred –

The website had to be mainly participant-centric majorly.
Communications around the event process need to be worked on. The communication including participation, booking confirmation, and payment for events at present happens in a manual way which makes the process difficult.
After the events are over, the information, etc around it is not easily shareable
Majorly the existing participants/ members also wanted the outreach to grow so they don’t lose touch with their heritage and could also pass that on to their children, who in most cases are completely unaware of the Odia culture.

Basis the data, the following personas were crafted