TaalCafe App: helping Dutch learners find & book language events in seconds
TaalCafe
is a café & community in The Hague where people of different nationalities can come together, feel at home, have fun & practice Dutch
Headquarters
The Hague, NL
Industry
Education & event management
Services
- UX research
- App design
- Prototyping
- User testing
The challenge
TaalCafe visitors browse events and buy tickets on their phones - but the site was built for desktop. Learners had to wade through walls of text just to find tonight's event. So, together with the community, I redesigned the event discovery and ticket-buying experience mobile-first.
Solution
A mobile app where finding an event, grabbing a ticket and showing up takes seconds - so visitors can focus on what they came for: learning Dutch & having fun, resulting in a total redesign rating of 8.6 in place from the previous designs 6.4 rating.
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Results
All five user tests came back with the redesign scoring higher on every metric.
Ease of use and visual appeal improved the most: users found the app more intuitive, more engaging and simply nicer to use.
What users struggle with
A brand is only as good as the experience behind it - and interviews at TaalCafe events showed most visitors browse and buy tickets on their phones, yet find the site buggy. So I audited it on desktop and mobile with a heuristic evaluation.
The audit confirmed it: walls of text bury the event calendar behind endless scrolling, four calendar layouts and five event-card versions leave users guessing, and mobile hides events behind an invisible sideways scroll.
Mobile is hit hardest: squished layouts, glitchy buttons, duplicated event info and blank attendee profiles - failing core heuristics like consistency and error prevention.
Empathising with the user
I watched a real user do what they always do - find and book an event on their phone - and captured their frustrations in a persona and journey map.
Defining the solution
From the research I mapped the ideal journey: from 'I want to practice Dutch' to 'I've got a ticket' with zero detours.
Because that journey happens on phones, I sketched the MVP as a mobile app, starting with wireframes.
Then I turned the sketches into reusable components.
Designing the new app
The new homepage sets the mood instantly: lively banners, bold colour and 'few tickets left' cues that nudge you to book - all within thumb's reach, and capped at seven sections (Miller's Law) so it never overwhelms.
Smarter filters: the price filter is gone (tickets are always €6 or €9), confusing labels were renamed, overlapping tags merged after a card-sorting session - and you can finally filter by host.
Event pages that answer first: key info at the top, a simpler attendee list and host buttons that look clickable.
One-screen checkout: the total updates live as you add tickets, and card details appear only when you pick card payment.
And a ticket page keeps upcoming & past events organised in one place.
Testing my prototype
To validate the design, five users completed the same tasks on the old mobile site and on my prototype, then rated both. Below you can see each participant's recording and scores:
