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In 2018, Cvent was in the final stages of acquiring a competitor in the mobile event app space. This would add an additional headcount of 100 people to our mobile workforce.
But their current mobile solution (shown here) was outdated, and lacked a compelling direction for the future.
We needed a vision to rally around, and a product strategy to unite and direct this newly expanded workforce.
Team
Mark Iris (Sr. Principal UX Designer)
Timeline
2 weeks discovery & design
Outcome
a new, industry-leading mobile app & a presentation that would kick-start a full redesign initiative.
Process
• 3 days of research & discovery
• 2 days on IA & wireframing
• 5 days of high fidelity design & prototyping
• Then, build a presentation and begin the road show
To make our new app useful and compelling, we need to understand the attendee activities at each stage of an event timeline.
From this, we can extrapolate user needs and design an experience that evolves along with needs & expectations, providing unique value across the event continuum.
All current functionality would need to be included in the new vision, so I started by taking an inventory the current app, and reorganizing functions & destinations into relevant categories.
Now that I've broken the product into its parts, I need to understand what features are most frequently utilized, and gather any insights depicting changes in app and feature usage over the course of an event.
This will help guide the information architecture and content strategy that's built in reconstruction.
The goal is to design a market-leading product, so I need to have a clear understanding of the competitive landscape. In this exercise, I create a matrix of available features across the marketplace.
Through this process, I'll start to form a point of view as to what's most important, and what constitutes the best possible experience.
I run a quick grouping exercise to roughly map out the IA, consisting of existing and new features & functionality.
Next, I build out low fidelity wires demonstrating multiple approaches to IA, structure, interaction models, and content strategies.
Once I have a working model, I begin to rough in representative shapes for primary destinations, repeating templates and patterns.
Personalized content and social recommendations power the experience, so a light, event-specific onboarding flow collects tastes, interests, connection, and privacy preferences.
Content, actions, and recommendations throughout the app's main destinations will change depending on where you are in the event timeline, while the app's core structure remains constant.
Before event: Planning focused
During event: Experience focused
After event: Recall focused
An extensible profile template accommodates all person-entities throughout the application by adding sections based on the type of entity and content associated with each.
Content types were uncovered through targeted market research by archetype and collected customer requests.
Browse sessions & build your schedule within the same space.
Dynamic session page with documents, audience voting, session channels.
Topic channels, games, and attendee directory with intelligent recommendations.
After a 2-week solo sprint, I had a fully realized prototype with over 60 screens, encompassing all of the original functionality, and tons of new ideas, all packaged into a clean, modern, and simplified app structure.
The Home Screen was previously a grid of icons without any content hierarchy or strategy.
Now the event is brought to life through 3 intuitive, mobile-native tabs, a theming system to match your brand, a dynamic, engaging, and personalized content strategy, delivered through a CMS with a customizable module library.
Previously, the left navigation was a "catch-all" that duplicated the home screen content and added a bunch of other important destinations.
There were no hierarchical or proximal patterns in place to create meaning and convey importance.
All of your personal & actionable things now appear in the left panel, giving it a focused purpose.
With prototype in hand, I began the road show. I first presented to the PM, UX, and Developers of the Cvent mobile team. I collected feedback and iterated to incorporate new ideas and suggestions.
The next round of presentations to VP's, CTO, and CPO included a suggested roadmap and implementation strategy.
It was a smashing success, and launched the largest initiative within Cvent, a full-scale redesign of the mobile apps, just in time to welcome in our newly expanded work force.
My next step was to hand off the concepts & philosophy behind them to the folks that will be developing them further. At this point it's important to instill ownership & autonomy, encouraging people to take the momentum of this first step and run with it.
The project was featured that year at Cvent Connect, and was the buzz of the conference. Event planners couldn't wait to get their hands on it, and participated in design discovery activities on site to push the concepts further.
As companies & products scale, they have a tendency to become feature-factories, losing the ability to take a step back and examine their holistic product strategy. In those moments, they are most vulnerable to disruption.
Before our products grow stale, we must regularly carve out time to stretch our creative & strategic capabilities, creating future state visions to aspire to.