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How do you turn 20 years of enterprise development, dozens of acquisitions, and a catalogue of products, into one cohesive platform?
You place the user in the center of it all.
Cvent is the leader in the event tech industry by a large margin. It has been for over 20 years. In that time, it has built and acquired a large portfolio of over 30 products.
The product portfolio is split into two platforms: The Event Cloud, which services Event Planning and Marketing teams, and the Hospitality Cloud, which services Hoteliers, Venues, and Vendors.
Unfortunately, it's all very difficult to use. And I was given a year to figure out how to fix it.
“Complicated set up, disorganized navigation, and poor usability all contribute to a platform that is difficult to understand and use. It feels like several products bolted together, without a clear view of how the overall solution should look, or how it should function.”
2018 CSAT Report
Using the product design discovery process, identify and define the experience vision for a new, unified, Cvent platform.
Updated IA across platform
Collaboration, project mgmt
Self-service, flexibility
Remove product barriers
Personalize, customize
Support organizations
I wrote this article based on my initial research, and circulated it around design and product leadership to get a feel for the company's baseline understanding and appetite, and begin to craft a new shared language.
I made a dashboard building kit using big legos and whiteboard material. I ran the activity with ~25 customers at Cvent's annual tradeshow. They could draw whatever they wanted on each block, and rearrange them to build their perfect dashboard.
This was fun. I learned a lot about our users need for customization and modularity.
Myself and a few other UX leads hosted 5 UX workshops. Each session had 20 customers spanning a variety of roles, industries, and experience. We were trying to understand their biggest pain points and needs from the Cvent platform.
The insights from these workshops proved to be more valuable than any other research, and I would come back to it often throughout the design process.
The research was telling me to support the activities our customers do every day in between using our products.
What are those activities?
Collaboration, planning, project management, customer relations, marketing, data analysis, and so much more. These activities are central to their jobs, and our customers use other platforms and products for all of it.
We needed to rearchitect the platform to support teams and individuals with roles and permissions.
We can manage complexity with a hierarchical system of nested objects, entities and attributes.
Objects can be interrelated and nested within other objects to form meaningful, contextual, and intuitive pathways.
We can drastically simplify navigation.
It seemed like an impossible task. There are layers of mega-menus with ~190 links.
Each product had different patterns, components and behaviors.
Rebuild the current navigation in Sketch. I believe it was over 190 links in the current global navigation.
Categorize and color code. Find overlapping themes.
Grouping exercises. Getting a feel for the nesting hierarchy.
Started the new IA in Excel for speed and efficiency.
We ran a card sort activity with ~50 users on the Event Object IA.
Here's the new IA for the global navigation.
A tree test was performed on the Global IA with 35 users.
Here's the new IA for the Event object.
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The new system allows you to pivot between organizations, and teams within them. Each org, team, and user has a main destination that synthesizes their important objects and insights. There are 7 global hubs containing different types of core objects or functions: Planning, People, Events, Venues, Outreach, Insights, and Solutions.
As was outlined in my Object Complexity Model, page templates are utilized throughout the system, and can be extended or simplified to meet the needs of a page or object, based on its complexity or information density.
I organized 12 moderated user tests at Cvent’s Connect 2019 conference. The participants were chosen for variability across large and small organizations, in different roles, and different industries.
I synthesized all the insights and time-stamped them. I had one of my direct reports take the raw video and create highlight reels for different themes that came up in the testing.
All of this went into our research library.
"It's so easy to use. I can finally understand everything. When can I have it!?"
View specs for a few of the pieces of the Ecosystem.
When the year came to a close, I won Cvent's "Intrapreneur of the Year" award. The VP of Design made this video for the awards ceremony.
None of this would have been possible without the unrelenting support and conviction of Julie Mathers, the VP of Design, my manager, mentor, and friend.
I learned so much during this year-long project. It took a ton of collaboration, research, and design exploration. There were times when I had no idea where I was going, and times when I felt like Mozart on the keys.
But my main takeaway is the incredible impact that an experience vision can have inside an organization. If you can get leadership to take the trip with you, you can find a new direction and do incredible things that seemed impossible just a year ago.
