Ukrainian Creative Stories

UKRAINIAN CREATIVE STORIES (UCS) is the largest advertising project bringing together Ukraine's leading creative ad festivals (KIAF, ADC and Ukrainian design). Its main goal is to showcase the talents of the Ukrainian creative industry, celebrate the bright names and reward the best works. The All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition turned to our team with a request to develop a single platform for holding all three festivals.

Of course, we agreed, but if we knew what awaits us, we would think again whether to take on the job;). Jokes aside, this is indeed one of the most difficult cases in the 20-year history of CF. Digital, because the final stage of the project came at the beginning of a full-scale invasion. In addition, we had to adapt and partially remake the project for the new concept of Ukrainian Creative Stories, which the organizers had to transform because of the war. All this happened through the sound of sirens and in a very short time.

Project Task

Our main task was to combine 4 festival resources that are completely different in structure and logic into one: KIAF, ADC, Ukrainian design and the main Creative Stories website, which contained general information about the project and the customer, as well as ticket sales for the festival. We also need to create a single convenient space for users: site administrators, the jury of the festival and its participants.

Challenges and implementation

The project was developed based on our standard methodology: structure formation, prototype, design of the main page and all the rest, technical project, implementation, testing, and production. 

It is important to note that the implementation of this project would not have been possible without close cooperation with the client. Perfect knowledge of the product on his part and maximum support at all stages of implementation helped to achieve the desired result and surpass it.

• Jury personal account

Working on this module, we foremost paid attention to the experience of European and American festivals and planned to make a "cocktail" of the most convenient instruments and functions. But it turned out that in fact they have a lot of flaws. Therefore, our team set about developing our own solution, based on the practices of VRK and our own experience of participating in festivals as a jury. However, each festival has its own rating system: like/dislike or the usual scale from 1 to 100, in terms of functionality it was difficult to combine them on one platform.

As a result, we got a whole ecosystem thought out to the smallest detail: from securely creating passwords, sending notifications to a convenient and understandable voting interface. The structure and navigation of the block are built in such a way that the user can get all the information about the submitted projects, vote at the same time and go to the next participant or edit his points without unnecessary movements. We have also developed a "progress" scale where the jury can keep track of how many entries have not yet received their points.

 

• Festival participant's personal account

This part of the work was no less difficult, since most of the nuances could not be foreseen at the prototype and design stage. Our own experience of participating in such festivals was required here too. After all, we understood how many difficulties participants sometimes have to face when submitting works. As they say, teeth also hurt when they grow. This metaphor very well visualizes the work of our developers at the stage of creating a member's account.

As a result, we got a comfortable and convenient space where you can edit attached files, information about the participant’s project, add or change a category / subcategory in a few seconds. And all this is in the best traditions of Users-friendly, when you do not have to spend hours looking for one button leading to Narnia.
 

• Admin panel

At this stage, it is necessary to take into account all the requirements of the festival organizers and create an environment for convenient and effective monitoring of the stages of festivals. It was not without colossal assistance to the client here. During the development process, there were also many improvements. As a result: an intuitive interface and many options for managing the course of the festival: changing / adding categories, voting status, monitoring participants, etc.

In addition, we were faced with the need to take into account the behaviour of the site depending on certain actions of all its users, blocking certain functions and preventing user errors. Many small nuances required our developers to create flexible tools and functions from scratch specifically for this project.

• Buying tickets

In the ticket purchase section, we realized that the standard basket option would not work for the Ukrainian Creative Stories site, since there were many ticket options for each of the festivals: for the entire period of the festival, for a day, for half a day, etc. And each user could have their own personal discounts, depending on many factors.

Our solution was the individual formation of the booking of each user. That is, the creation of a whole dashboard, which included the selection of all the necessary parameters, filling in the data, checking and confirming the order, and only then the purchase. It also helped to avoid user errors during checkout and streamline the purchase process.

The final stage of the project took place at the beginning of a full-scale invasion, when the psychological and emotional state of all Ukrainians was difficult, and they had to work in between air raid alerts. The war started making its own adjustments all over the place,, and the UCS festival was no exception. The organizers had to quickly change the concept, and we, accordingly, the technical component of the platform.

Despite this, we managed to create an IT product that satisfies the needs of the customer and site users, as evidenced by the feedback from an anonymous survey among the jury and participants of the festival, worthy of all the efforts of the CF.Digital team: