Lake Eola Park Live Hub

Project background

Lake Eola Park is the cultural heart of Downtown Orlando — a central public space hosting weekly markets, performances, and daily recreational use. Yet its digital presence is restricted to a text-heavy sub-page within the orlando.gov directory, and event information is fragmented across multiple city pages and third-party platforms, making it difficult to access timely, relevant information on mobile.

Market opportunity: by centralizing fragmented data from park-sanctioned events and local businesses, this platform reduces “information labor” for over 100,000 monthly visitors. Why this brief: it targets a genuine void in civic UX and urban utility, where responsive design and information architecture can meaningfully improve community interaction with a public space — drawing on a professional background in architecture and human-centered systems.

The design problem

Lake Eola lacks a dedicated, mobile-optimized platform for real-time event discovery and visit planning. Users must manually search across multiple sources to answer simple questions: what’s happening right now or this weekend, where should I go and what can I do, how do I plan my visit quickly, and where do I park. This creates friction, decision fatigue, and limits accessibility and spontaneous engagement.

Focus areas

Understanding the visit

Competitive analysis

A review of major urban park platforms surfaced consistent strategic opportunities rather than a single feature gap:

• Minimized information labor — micro-chunking replaces long-form text with actionable event cards for immediate decisions.
• Real-time live context — a dedicated “Happening Now” feed addresses the lack of live updates on standard park sites.
• Reduced cognitive load — a task-oriented UI targets high-friction activities like parking and amenity discovery.
• Simplified spatial utility — select-to-path navigation gives spatial orientation without real-time GPS complexity.
• Dedicated platform identity — a standalone hub instead of a buried municipal directory page.
• Enhanced mapping interaction — hi-fi bottom sheets for map pins identify restrooms and food without leaving the map.

User interviews

5 participants, moderated and remote — urban residents who regularly visit local city parks and/or rely on digital schedules for events. Interviews covered discovery & filtering, planning friction, on-site spatial navigation, and information value.

Research synthesis

Who this is for

“I hate this website. There's nothing here about events really.”

29, dog owner, car-light. Relies on transit, biking, and walking; discovers events through social platforms and physical signage since official sites feel text-heavy and lack real-time context. Needs immediately visible cost & time on event cards, a clear “Happening Now” distinction, and combined category/amenity filters.

“If something big is happening and I know it'll be overcrowded, I won't even go.”

37, car-dependent, plans for a group. The logistical anchor for family and friends, often coordinating a toddler or elderly parents; a park visit is a planned outing, not a drop-in. Needs centralized logistics (parking, access, amenities) visible upfront, confirmed restroom/accessibility info, and a simplified static A-to-B route rather than live GPS.

Framing the problem

1. Fragmented event discovery — park visitors struggle to discover timely, relevant events because information is scattered across official sites, social media, third-party platforms, and physical signage, making spontaneous participation difficult.
2. High-friction visit planning — new visitors face high cognitive load because logistics (parking, amenities, accessibility, crowd level, weather) are hard to find or scattered, and even one missing detail can cancel a family outing.

Project goals

Core goal: design a centralized, mobile-friendly live hub that simplifies park event discovery, visit planning, and on-site navigation through real-time-feeling updates, clear logistical information, and intuitive spatial guidance.

Feature roadmap

Prioritized MoSCoW roadmap, translating the goals above into what actually made it into scope:

Sitemap

User flow

From sketches to testable flow

Lo-fi wireframes

Mid-fidelity wireframes

Lo-fi: tested how to separate “Happening Now” from the upcoming events list without redundancy; where filtering lives relative to browsing; how a static select-to-path map could feel purposeful without live GPS; what belonged on the homepage versus a dedicated Events page.

Mid-fi key decisions: a logistics snapshot strip (hours, weather, crowd level, amenities) surfaces directly on the homepage; event cards carry cost and end time up front; tapping any event opens a bottom sheet rather than a full page, keeping context; the park map keeps amenity and event pins on one layer with a filter sheet.

Mid-fi usability testing

Moderated remote testing across three task flows: finding a free event this weekend, planning a family visit to the Sunday Farmers Market, and on-site navigation to find a restroom from the park entrance.

Signal to address next iteration: multiple participants paused and looked for a “you are here” indicator on the static map before proceeding — strong enough to warrant a default location pin even without live GPS.

High-fidelity screens

Visual system

Orlando Blue (derived from the City of Orlando's own brand) anchors navigation, headers, and trust; Jungle Green — pulled from the park's fountain and lawns — is reserved for calls to action; Bright Amber adds warmth for tags and attention-getting moments, used sparingly after failing WCAG contrast as a primary color. Barlow Condensed carries display headers; Inter carries body copy, each with its own mobile/tablet/desktop type scale.

Mobile screens

Flow: land on the homepage logistics snapshot and Happening Now banner → browse or filter Upcoming Events by category, timeframe, or a custom date picker → tap into an event's detail page for schedule, rules, and parking → jump to the park map, filter by amenity, and open a pin's status sheet.

Desktop & A/B testing

Critical decision point: Layout Variant A (Bento Box format) won by a clear 4-to-1 margin in testing and became the core desktop homepage foundation, optimized further with wider text-column padding, hover pop-up data preview cards, and a persistent map legend.

Key iterations after usability testing

Notable revisions: filter chips reorganized into a flat, single-tier row for scanning speed; the custom date picker collapsed to one confirmation step instead of two; event detail pages now surface parking and transportation info curated to the specific event rather than a generic park-wide list, with real LYMMO transit details replacing placeholder copy; map pins simplified to dots grouped by category with a tap-to-expand legend; the “Find Route” feature was reframed around landmark-based static routing after testing showed users expected (and didn't get) live GPS from it — addressed by leaning into the static A-to-B framing rather than trying to imitate GPS.

Key design decisions

• Jungle Green for CTAs only — a firm color rule kept the primary action color meaningful across dozens of components instead of drifting into decoration.
• Bright Amber, decoration-only — dropped as an interactive color after failing WCAG contrast checks; kept for tags and attention accents instead.
• Popular Times-style crowd graph — modeled the Crowd Level indicator after Google Maps' Popular Times bars specifically because the pattern needed almost no explanation.
• Real research grounding fictional UI — details like the LYMMO holiday transit schedule and the Downtown Orlando Farmers Market's actual vendor count (~50 vendors, running since 1987) were verified rather than invented, so the copy reads as a real civic product rather than a mockup.

High-fidelity usability testing

Task Flow 1 — Event discovery & date filtering: find all free events next week, then specifically on July 4th, using the filter chips and custom date picker. Task Flow 2 — Map navigation & amenity verification: from the Fireworks at the Fountain event page, jump to the map, filter to restrooms only, and confirm one is open.

Results

Task Flow 1 analysis: every participant successfully isolated a free target event; minor rating drops came from obscured date tags or friction with multi-step calendar entries. Task Flow 2 analysis: 4 of 5 successfully isolated the restrooms; the one failure came from flat 2D amenity icons masking their own interactivity, and amenities nested inside the Filters menu reading as less intuitive than expected.

Iteration

The friction points above became the concrete next-iteration list: make map amenity icons read as tappable rather than flat/decorative, surface restroom and amenity filters more directly instead of nesting them inside a general Filters menu, and strengthen date-tag visibility on event cards so the calendar-entry steps need fewer corrections.

Reflection & final results

Growth as a designer

This project pushed past “make it look nice” into defending every decision with evidence. Early calls — which parking street to recommend, what the restroom hours were — were made on gut feeling and got corrected more than once for stating things that hadn't actually been verified. By the end, checking a claim before shipping it became automatic. Design-systems thinking grew alongside it: a typography hierarchy from H1 through Meta across mobile and desktop scales, color rules (Jungle Green for CTAs only, Bright Amber as decoration-only after a WCAG contrast failure, Prussian Blue for hover states), and consistent spacing conventions kept dozens of components coherent across a large file instead of drifting apart.

Research insight

The strongest insight was that generic-sounding advice was often wrong once actually checked. “Park closest to your destination” sounds like good default parking advice — until you learn the closest, free streets around a major event are exactly the ones that fill first, and the better advice is to recommend a garage or street slightly farther out.

What was enjoyable

The iterative refinement loops on the Park Conditions cards — Weather, Crowd Level, Park Hours, Swan Boats — through rounds of “this looks empty,” “this text is filler,” “this doesn't have enough contrast,” watching a component earn its place on the page. Also the research digging itself: finding the real LYMMO holiday transit schedule, the actual Downtown Orlando Farmers Market vendor count, or that Central Florida's afternoon-thunderstorm pattern could genuinely justify the weather strip's icon sequence — grounding UI copy in real facts made the whole thing feel like a real product decision, not a mockup.

Key challenge

Translating mobile to desktop properly, rather than just stretching, was the most challenging part of the process. Resizing a component and calling it done consistently produced either dead space or cramped mobile-scale text inside an oversized box. Building a real desktop type scale and spacing system, and applying it component by component, was the only thing that actually solved it — validated by the Layout A vs. B desktop A/B test.

Next steps

• Make map amenity icons read as clearly tappable, and surface restroom/amenity filters outside the general Filters menu
• Add a static default “you are near” location pin to the park map based on the user's selected starting point
• Strengthen date-tag visibility on event cards to reduce friction in the custom date-picker flow