The background

The client for this project was the #1 event app platform worldwide reaching thousands of event planners and millions of attendees in over 40 countries. Supporting a variety of organizations from the Fortune 500 to professional associations, their goal is to carefully blend the user experience with the event experience, and change the way attendees engage at live events.

As the market in the event technology space was continuing to grow and become more saturated, the client wanted to take a fresh look at their users and get a better understanding of what their lifecycle looked like from end-to-end. As much as different parts of the company worked with clients on a daily basis, we didn't have a collective view of who the client was as a whole, their struggles, and needs along their journey to planning an event. Without this understanding, it was very difficult for the client to have empathy for their users. 

The project objectives 

• Understand our users journey through the event planning process
• Educate the company and inform future projects
• Internal processes for knowledge sharing
• Expose areas that we could innovate beyond the competition

My contributions

• User research
• Educational workshop materials
• Lead education and exploratory brainstorm workshops

THE RESEARCH PROCESS

Talking with clients

Methods: interviews, contextual inquiry, journey mapping mini-exercises

Now that I had established a foundation of knowledge, I was able to start reaching out to clients about their experiences planning an event, working with our platform, and all the pain and pleasure points along the way. This is where many of the insights from the internal feedback were validated from the user perspective. 

gathering insights from internal feedback

Methods: interviews, affinity mapping

The initial portion of this research was focused on extracting and documenting knowledge from internal teams.

A big part of the knowledge gap was the lack of communication between internal departments. While sales and support were working directly with clients through app setup calls, support services, on-sites and debriefs, not only were we not realizing insights, but also, valuable information would stay within their teams; hence, the rest of the company was blind to information that could potentially improve their work.

Secondary Research

To help understand industry best practices, competitor flows and the other tools our users were using, I engaged in secondary research. Especially with the tight time constraints of this project, using existing data allowed me to fill in any other gaps, and gain deeper insight into the user and recognize patterns beyond the selected sample.

The outcome

Documented and synthesized findings

Insights from this research were used: 

• As a foundation for discussion around internal processes
• To inform product decisions around features such as importing and exporting data into our platform, as well as how we onboard our users. 

Insights

Synthesis of the data allowed us to expose valuable insights, for example, we realized:

• Our event app was only the tail end of the event planner lifecycle, and there was a sea of opportunity before the planner had their first touch point with us
• The pain points experienced post-event were tied to late adoption of our platform, which was tied to lack of education and poor timing

Findings such as the above were summarized in a detailed report and presentation deck that were circulated throughout the company. 

interactive journey map (workshops)

In product innovation workshops, I ran an interactive session that was meant to educate the product team on our users and start conversations around where our next opportunities were. 

Educational Program

As part of my rose as the UX Strategist, it was my prerogative to lead education about our users to the rest of the company.  As part of this initiative, I ran educational seminars for all new employees as part of our on-boarding experience. A main company initiative was to focus practices on human-centred design and shift our vision on experience over features.