Designing for events in a pandemic
What does a large organization do when a once in a lifetime pandemic happens.
This case study is a work in progress.
BACKGROUND
Who is Cvent and what was my role?
Cvent offers software solutions to event planners and marketers for online event registration, venue selection, event management and marketing, virtual, hybrid, and onsite solutions, and attendee engagement. I worked within a product team that consisted of 4 designers, a content writer, and a researcher. The larger organization of Cvent has around 4000 employees and 80 people within the UX organization.
While a lot of companies were hit hard during the pandemic. Event companies were hit the hardest. It was an interesting time to be a designer at a company that I wasn’t sure if they would be around after the pandemic.
I am not going to talk about a specific project in this case study but about what the experience was like at a company shattered by the pandemic.
PROJECTS
Contributions and design work
During my time at Cvent I contributed to multiple projects before and during the pandemic. A highlight list that I had direct contributions:
Multiple components/documentation contributed back to our design system that helped over 40 designers work across our organization.
Extensive usability testing on our request for proposal process. Partnering with our research team to test and gather insights.
A redesign on how event planners compare venues.
Led the redesign of our destination guide.
Destination guide redesign influenced multiple projects and interactions in other design work.
PANDEMIC
A scramble to figure out where events fit into a world where events were not happening
The beginning of the pandemic was very scary. Not only for what was happening in the world but also our jobs at Cvent were up in the air. Cvent scrambled to address what was happening by proposing a new product for virtual events. While I was not part of the project it was exciting to see designers come together to quickly design and develop a product that worked in the new remote world we were pivoting too.
From a design side of things we double downed on creating a product experience that was consistent across all of Cvent products. The theory was the better the product experience the better we will come out of the pandemic ahead of our crushed competition.
We also focused on our design system so not only would we have a consistent experience but also components our teams could use to build faster products and prototypes during unprecedented times.
I contributed to a new design for our request for proposals and our design system.
OUTCOMES
Outcomes to my contributions
Design system components used in our simple RFP, request RFP, and a few other products.
A redesign of our existing request for proposal process.
A successful launch of our destination guide that I led the design for.
Prototype for comparing venues in FramerX and documentation for designers to use in the future.
