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Virtual Pivot

Aventri

Senior Manager, User Experience
2017-Now

Responsible for:

  • Design strategy
  • Stakeholder workshops
  • Client validation
  • Concept development
  • Recruitment of designers

Outputs:

  • Design system
  • Interaction and visual design
The first lockdown of 2020 hit the events industry hard. As a company we had to pivot our product to allow planners to offer virtual alternatives to their cancelled in-person events.

 

We rapidly developed a virtual feature that seamlessly integrated into the event management software. This allowed planners to either use our own virtual feature, with the benefits of harness all the activity data or use an external service of their choice such as zoom, webex etc.

The timeframe from concept to release was 3 months, which we achieved delivering a themeable platform to support a virtual or hybrid programme.

What I inherited

We had a registration module that included the ability to create an agenda of in-person sessions. To maximize speed to market we decided to expand this to support joining a session virtually. This would take advantage of all the permission settings and purchasing models of the regular registration flow.

The approach

We conducted some competitor research by looking at training videos, trying products, reading reviews and auditing features.

Competitor landscape
Stakeholder workshops

We needed to move quickly, and I designed a remote workshop with key stakeholders from different parts of the business (support, sales, development, pro-serve) to capture as many customer insights as possible and help identify import challenges HMW (how might we…) and the target user base.

Double diamond and scamps.

I pivoted the team to use Figma and opened up the sketching and ideation to the wider team. Within 3 days we explored many ideas until we narrowed down our concepts (double diamond) using feedback and iteration from the steering group.

Final designs

Features included, virtual lobby, virtual session( broadcast or collaborative, breakout rooms, recording management and backend screens for planners to configure.

This was a huge success with clients, delivered within 3 months from research to first release and allowed some events to pivot to virtual during the lockdown.

What I learned

Harnessing the wisdom of the global team really sped up what we could achieve. The remote workshops helped identify key challenges planners faced and provided a great foundation for our hypothesis which in turn informed our research and validation plan with event planners and attendees.