Designing and scaling an event management system
A summary of how we built out an event management app for a growing media business
- Project Completed 2024
- Project Role UX/UI Design, Usability Testing, Branding, Management, Information Architecture
Background
Working as the lead product designer for a news media company, I was responsible for maintaining and improving our in-house event management product. The primary use of the product was to facilitate the different teams to build out their online meeting and events presence.
Following the completion of several acquisitions within a short period of time, evolving our event management product and processes to incorporate the new organizations became an important element of integration efforts.
Problem Statement
The events management system needs to scale with our growing business while prioritizing accessibility.
Project Objectives
In preparation for this initiative, we identified three main objectives:
- Improve product efficiency while increasing product adoption
- Increase and validate product credibility for our newly integrated businesses
- Evolve our product with a focus on scalability to support a fast growing events business
A clipping of the audits that were completed of the existing platform.
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Strategy / Approach
We put a significant focus on identifying potential new components that may be needed while we introduced new users to the platform. We needed to ensure a successful roll-out to establish credibility with the newly acquired businesses, and using the input from the newly acquired teams would create a comprehensive product requirements and features list.
Execution
Through an iterative stakeholder focused design process, I designed roughly 20 components that are now deployed and usable within the product. Both front and back end interfaces are accounted for in this project. Additional time was used working with the software engineers to make sure designs matched and accounted for the different individual brand requirements.
Challenges and Solutions
The largest obstacle to overcome in this initiative was the need to reengage product stakeholders multiple times as we scaled to support the onboarding of several newly acquired businesses.
Completed template with a few of the components displayed to event examples.
An early version of the event template design prototype.
As new companies were acquired, they were given the choice to remain with an external events management system or integrate and help fund our internal event product. Essentially, our challenge was to convince them to use our product over an external solution.
Results and Metrics
Our team designed and scaled an event management app that evolved from just 25 to over 300 users and from 24 to over 200 events a year. More than 500 events were produced in roughly a two year period using the event software.
Additionally, we brought all major company events underneath a single platform, successfully integrating all the different brands and companies that had been acquired.
Below are screenshots of the event product.
