I conducted 3 interviews with 3 couples varying from different colors, nationalities, occupations and wedding status, including newly-engaged, married couples and international marriage.  Throughout the interviews, this research aims to understand the considerations, difficulties, solutions and emotion changes of different couples when planning an outdoor wedding.

Hosting a successful outdoor wedding poses unique challenges, particularly for international marriages.

In two specific cases of international marriages, where the couples are also hosting destination weddings, they face the complex task of managing each other's family and friends who hail from different countries. This endeavor involves navigating issues such as

*visas, language barriers, travel arrangements, and coordinating pre-wedding activities, all while encountering potential information delay.*

Additionally, to ensure a harmonious cultural experience for their guests, they must carefully consider incorporating elements of diverse and evolving wedding customs into their guestlist and menu design.

Especially towards guestlist and menu design, they say :

“We finalized the dinner menu just the day before big day, because we just couldn’t settle down the guestlist. Some of my friends couldn’t make it to the wedding due to visa or time schedule, which is kind of sad..”

“About menu, I think we chose more carefully than the regular dinner. Food should be more diverse and flexible in case there’re some changes in guestlist.”

To obtain the qualitative data, I created empathy map for each interviewee and clustered the pain points form each interview by using affinity map. 

The key pain point themes are wedding design, instruction for planning, budget control, collaboration & communication, guestlist & information collection and plan B for unpredictable situation.

I summarized the following 6 prominent demands :

• Need clear and organized instructions when starting to plan a wedding

• Difficult to locate the ideal reference image online
• Struggles to track and control their budget

• Hard to collect and organize guestlist information in a clear and unified way

• Worried and anxious about unpredictable situation on big day 
• increase their partner's participation and communication while maintaining a balanced collaboration between them

Brainstorming solutions:

• Have personalized and user-oriented checklist as clear instructions for planning
• Provide planning progress and tracking visualization to help users ease stress and understand planning status
  
• Include AI system to help generate ideal wedding inspirations and emerge custom traditions
• Have online communication and co-work system that allows multiple users to collaborate and discuss about wedding details
• List budget average-use for reference
• Implement a standardized form to collect and record responses from guests uniformly
  
• Weather tracking on big day and help providing local resources for wedding savior
• Visualization of virtual wedding scene for tracking progress

        ...

The competitive analysis indicates that existing wedding planning apps are lacking inclusive services specifically tailored for outdoor wedding planning. These apps notably neglect crucial aspects such as collaborative systems for couples, a comprehensive reference image gallery, personalized checklist creation, and contingency plan suggestions (Plan B).

Concentrated Features

In response to practical considerations and with the goal of establishing a clear product positioning, the brainstorming solutions have been narrowed down, resulting in the concentration of 6 main features for OWESIS:

1. Interconnected system to streamline the wedding planning process, promoting consistency and efficiency

2. Visualizations in planning progress and tracking 

3. Noteborad for easy collaboration and information sharing

4. Smart infomation organization to ease the stress from guestlist collection

5. AI assistant emerged to generate ideal wedding references

6. Weather tracking and backup plan suggestions to guarantee wedding excution