DOORLIST

Project Highlights

Throughout my time at Doorlist I have embarked on various different projects. This one emphasizes the improvement of many issues regarding college students’ safety.

My new designs led to:

  1. Increased Active Users: Expanded the user base from 45,000 to 150,000 active users within six months.

  2. University Adoption: Doorlist was adopted by users at over 100 universities.

  3. IFC Contracts: Secured over $50,000 in contracts for IFC-managed events due to the enhanced safety features.

  4. Admin Retention: 92% of surveyed admins cited improved safety and event control as key reasons for continued use.

My Responsibilities

UX/UI Designer, Qualitative Research: Usability Testing, Surveys, Quantitative Research: Focus Groups, Task Flows

My Role

End-to-End Lead UI/UX Designer

My Team

1 Lead UI/UX Designer

4 Software Engineers

5 Growth

Duration

9 months

Tools

Figma, Posthog, Flutter, VSCode, Qualtrics, Maze

Doorlist Event Management

Doorlist’s ability to handle mass invites for events ranging from 50 to 5,000 attendees makes it an essential tool for large-scale coordination. However, this scalability poses challenges for admins in managing RSVPs, +1s, and guest lists while maintaining safety and avoiding logistical errors. Existing solutions lack the efficiency to handle these complexities.

A redesign was necessary to streamline workflows, enforce safety measures, and equip admins with tools for effective event management at any scale.

PROCESS 1: RESEARCH

Focus Groups

Focus groups with 10 students revealed that admins cared most about real-time safety tools, +1 management, easy event creation, and post-event insights. They also noted struggles with overcrowding and tracking guest attendance effectively.

Key Insight: Admins need tools that simplify processes, enhance accountability, and provide clear data for future planning.

Understanding the Admins

Who? What?

Admins are typically executive members of Greek or academic organizations. Their role involves providing invite access to members while maintaining control over the guest list.

What are the Success Metrics?

Success is measured by accurate RSVP tracking, proper +1 allocation, and adherence to IFC guidelines, ensuring events stay within planned capacity while reducing risks.

What are their objectives?

Admins aim to minimize risks at their events to keep their organizations in compliance with school rules and IFC guidelines.

Student Persona

Allen is a 21-year-old senior at the University of Virginia, majoring in Accounting. As the Social Chair of DKE fraternity, he manages events with 500–1,500 attendees. Allen’s primary focus is meeting IFC safety standards, managing large guest lists, and avoiding overcrowding while ensuring a positive experience for all attendees.

PROCESS 2: IDEATE

Enhancing Intuitiveness and Safety

PROCESS 4: Wireframes and Testing

Solving for pain points

I designed wireframes to address admin pain points, such as managing overcrowding and tracking guest lists.

Streamlined Event Management

I reduced event creation flow making it simpler to understand and create events with personalized safety settings.

Real-time Safety Control and Crowd Control

Admins struggled to monitor attendance during events. I developed tools to track which bouncers scanned guests, flag missed scans, and alert admins of capacity limits to ensure real-time accountability.

Risk Management

“You limit potential risks by not letting in people who don’t have a Doorlist, as you have a general idea of who will be there.” - Participant B Focus Group

Actionable Post-Event Insights

Admins found post-event reports cluttered and unhelpful. I redesigned analytics to include clear visuals like RSVP conversions, attendance trends, and invite sources, enabling data-driven improvements.

Testing

I tested wireframes with 10 college admins, focusing on event creation, +1 management, safety tools, and analytics. Feedback led to combining form fields to reduce setup time by 30%, adding a +1 management tab for edits and blacklists, and improving safety tools with scanning logs and flagged missed scans. Post-event analytics were redesigned with clear visuals, making data easier to interpret and act on.

PROCESS 5: Testing to Final Designs

Final Designs

Based on the results of usability testing, I refined the wireframes to address admin pain points and ensure the designs met user expectations. The changes made during this phase directly informed the final design, prioritizing simplicity, accountability, and efficiency

Streamlined Event Management

8 out of 10 participants found the original event creation process overwhelming, with 6 participants abandoning the flow halfway through.

Condensed the event creation process into a single-page flow, reducing steps by 50% and cutting the average completion time from 5 minutes to 1 minute.

Minimizing Event Risk

“I find it annoying Not being able to take away peoples +1's is slightly annoying if you make a mistake” - Participant F Usability Testing

User interviews and growth team insights highlighted the importance of tracking RSVPs, invites, and +1s. I added tools to send, edit, or revoke invites directly, working with engineers to ensure seamless integration.

Enforcing Safety

87 of 94 admin users in a user survey mentioned the feeling of safety as their main reason of using Doorlist. One participant expressed “Feeling of safety while running and managing events. Helps if anything goes wrong and we have to formulate a story.”

I designed bouncer scanning logs and alerts to ensure accountability during check-ins, helping admins track guest flow and avoid overcrowding.

Guest safety is enhanced not only by trusting admins to invite reliable attendees but also by enabling guests to track their own check-ins and notify friends of their arrival.

Actionable Post-Event Insights

Initial testing of the post-event analytics revealed that users struggled to understand the data presented.

Collaborating with both the growth team and engineers, I redesigned event analytics to include attendance trends, RSVP conversion rates, and traffic sources (e.g., invites, organizations). These updates allowed admins to quickly identify patterns and make data-driven improvements.

PROCESS 1: Usability Testing

Outcome

By improving the admin experience, this redesign also enhanced guest safety and usability. Features like detailed attendance tracking and +1 management ensured a smoother, safer experience for both admins and their event attendees.retention rate: keeping admins happy by promoting safety which brings members into the app

  1. Added blacklist options, the ability to edit +1s in real time, and tools to track who invited each guest, reducing unauthorized entries by 40% during testing.

  2. Redesigned the analytics dashboard with attendance trends, RSVP-to-attendance ratios, and invite demographics, using color-coded visuals for clarity. Testing showed a 60% increase in admins actively using post-event reports.

  3. Condensed the event creation process into a single-page flow, reducing steps by 80% and cutting the average completion time from 1.02 minutes to 0.7 minutes.

Considerations and Scope

This redesign addressed features for both admins and guest users, but this case study focuses on improving the admin experience. Admins play a pivotal role in ensuring event safety, managing guest lists, and maintaining control at scale. While guest-facing enhancements like self-check-ins and notifications were also implemented, they are not detailed in this case study.

The safety features proved highly valuable not only to admins but also to IFC councils, resulting in over $50,000 in contracts for events managed through Doorlist. This success inspired the creation of a new platform offering that enables IFC councils to confirm or deny campus events directly within Doorlist.

Here is an example of a demo presented to Northwestern University, which is currently in active negotiations for adoption.

Reach Out!

Feel free to contact me through the form, message me on LinkedIn, or shoot me an email at naoboru@sas.upenn.edu

If you have any feedback for me, I would love to hear it!