Events 365

Overview

Penton holds some of the largest national and regional conferences, expos, and trade shows in the U.S. each year. Notable events include Aviation Week MRO conferences, the Farm Progress Show, and Natural Products Expos.

Problem

The Events 365 project was an effort to connect Penton's event participants with Penton's other digital offerings beyond the event's seasonal lifespan. Research was conducted to investigate why event participants attended events, what frustrates and delights them about their experience, and what they're missing from that experience. That research was used to figure out how we can extend the solutions live event with a digital component.

Categories:
UI Design, Wireframes
Client
Penton Inc.
Team Members
Danielle Pacheco | UX Research,
UX Design, Visual Design
Serge Andreyev | UX Research
Sebastian Broways | Team Lead

Personas to keep the product customer-focused

Based on an early UX consultant's evaluation of Penton's event attendees, general website usability, and stakeholder interviews, personas were developed in-house to provide a benchmark for the project goals: Are we meeting the needs of our most important customer segments?

1:1 User Interviews

Using personas created at the beginning of the project in addition to pre-defined market segments informed by surveys, we chose users to interview in person at Penton's Natural Products Expo East the world’s largest natural, organic and healthy products trade show with more than 100,000 attendees.

Interviews revealed that offering recorded seminar sessions online was a clear winner, and that there were certain aspects of the event-going process that needed improvement.

"[The expo] is more about the networking and new product world, whereas most of the rest of the year is focused on our internal projects and operations."

Reorganizing Penton's event sites

After analyzing attendee and exhibitor goals and pain points, we knew we needed to eliminate some frustrations in the UI of the event site template: important event information was often buried, and registering was challenging. Mapping out all the pages and funnels of the site was key to getting a thorough view of the content. We were then able to move pages around and simplify the navigation.

Usability Tests

After some reorganization of the site navigation, we wanted to section-labels how easily attendees and exhitibors were able to complete certain tasks. Using simple wireframes, "hallway" section-labelss were conducted in the office: Users were asked to find information and complete tasks such as registering for the event. By leaving out the "bells and whistles" we were able to assess the effectiveness of the site nav alone.