Party+ Marketplace:
Designing a New Ecosystem for Party
Planning
Leading the end-to-end UX strategy, product design, and brand development for a first-of-its-kind marketplace, merging content, services, and eCommerce to attract a new generation of Party City customers.
Skills: UX Strategy, Interaction Design, UI Design, User Research, Brand Development, E-commerce Strategy
The Challenge
Traditional party planning is often fragmented and stressful for hosts. Simultaneously, Party City needed to innovate beyond standard retail to connect with a younger demographic (Gen Z/Millennial moms) and secure future growth in a changing market.
The Opportunity
To design and launch Party+, a new digital marketplace seamlessly integrating inspiration, local service booking (caterers, photographers, rentals), and traditional party supplies shopping into one cohesive, inspiring platform.
My Role & Approach
As the Sr. Manager of Interaction Design, I led the UX strategy and end-to-end product UI execution. My approach centered on:
- Deep User Understanding: Grounding all decisions in comprehensive user research and market analysis.
- Strategic Brand Building: Crafting a new, distinct brand identity tailored to the target audience.
- Holistic Experience Design: Creating intuitive flows for both party planners (customers) and service providers (vendors).
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborating closely with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to bring the vision to life.
Discovery: Understanding the Modern Host
To build the right foundation, we needed to deeply understand our target audience and the market. I established a multi-faceted research framework that included:
- User Surveys & Interviews (Thousands of participants)
- Detailed User Journey Mapping
- Competitive Analysis & Heuristic Evaluations (50+ brands)
- Vendor Partner Interviews
- Iterative UI Usability Testing
- A/B Testing (Visual preferences & brand expectations)
Key Insights
Our research revealed that Gen Z and Millennial moms heavily prioritized inspiration and discovery (often turning to social media) and sought authentic brand experiences. Trust was paramount when considering booking services online.
Strategy & Branding: From Insights to Identity
The research insights directly shaped our UX strategy and the development of the distinct Party+ brand identity:
- UX Strategy Shift: We moved away from traditional eCommerce grid layouts towards UI patterns inspired by social media discovery platforms to foster inspiration.
- Trust-Building Design: We focused on guided flows and transparency, especially for service bookings, to build user confidence.
- Brand Development: Recognizing the need for a modern, aspirational feel
distinct from the core Party City brand, I led efforts in:
- Naming convention research and testing (Party+, Party+ Pro).
- Defining an engaging and fun brand voice.
- Creating a unique, complementary color palette and image strategy (Lifestyle/UGC vs. Isolated Product).
- Developing vendor personas and a comprehensive brand playbook.
Designing the Experience: Key Features & Flows
Guided by research and strategy, we designed key experiences for both customers and vendors:
Customer Experience Highlights
Inspiration-Led Product Listing Page (PLP)
Replaced traditional product grids with large, aspirational lifestyle images in a gallery format (i.e.Instagram) to elevate storytelling and showcase services authentically.
Guided Service Product Detail Page (PDP)
Created a multi-step, guided template for service bookings to reduce cognitive load, build trust, and increase user confidence compared to traditional human sales processes.
Interactive Quiz & Features
Implemented key interactive elements like a personalized recommendations quiz, content hub, and wishlist functionality.
Unified Cart & Checkout
Developed a shared cart experience handling multiple vendors/delivery methods across Party+ and PartyCity.com.
Vendor Experience - Party+ Pros
Ensuring a seamless backend experience for our vendors was crucial for marketplace success:
- Led the UI design for customizing the Mirakl Marketplace SaaS platform.
- Designed a robust vendor user resource guide and documentation.
- Engineered front-end experiences to promote vendor services (e.g., curated collections).
Collaboration & Delivery
Bringing this complex marketplace to life required tight-knit collaboration. I worked daily with Product Managers to define requirements and technical interactions, and partnered closely with Engineering teams for workshopping solutions, advocating for ADA compliance and usability best practices, and conducting thorough QA/UAT testing.
Launch & Outcomes
After a year of dedicated effort, the team successfully launched the Party+ Marketplace pilot in Las Vegas.
- Featured 400+ local vendors across diverse service categories at launch.
- Delivered a first-of-its-kind cohesive ecosystem merging eCommerce, content, services, and tools for Party City.
- Provided an all-in-one, inspiration-to-purchase solution for customers and an intuitive platform for sellers.
- Crucially, this project served as the foundation for future "inspired shopping" transformation work on the core PartyCity.com platform.
Reflection
Party+ was a fantastic opportunity to tackle a complex business challenge through strategic UX and brand development. It allowed me to leverage my background in eCommerce while pushing innovation to create a truly dynamic, multi-faceted product that addressed nuanced user needs for both customers and vendors.