Case study
The Experience Vision
Cvent | 2018-2019
Summary

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.

Duties
research
UX Strategy
UX/UI Design
Leadership
Prototyping
Presentation

The set up

Expand all
Background

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.

Problems
“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
Objectives

Using the product design discovery process, identify and define the experience vision for a new, unified, Cvent platform.

1

Updated IA across platform

2

Collaboration, project mgmt

3

Self-service, flexibility

4

Remove product barriers

5

Personalize, customize

6

Support organizations

Research & discovery

First principles
What is a platform, anyway?

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.

Research methods
  • Industry research
    Who are the future promoters of this new platform? What is it like to do their job? I sought out the influencers in the event industry, read books, blogs and magazines, watched videos, and listened to podcasts.
  • Tracking use cases
    Every time I came across a new use case, I mapped it into a google doc,  categorized by product/experience.
  • Sales & marketing
    Understanding what products and features customers purchase and use together, how we position ourselves in the market, our marketing personas. What is the story we tell them, and is it working?
  • Internal interviews
    Conversations with key stakeholders in Product, Design, Engineering, Client Success, Implementation Specialists, Sales, Marketing, and more.
  • User research
    We already had piles of user research, personas, infographics, user studies, and journey maps.
  • Competitive analysis
    Direct and indirect, parallel and analogous competitive analysis. Besides direct and indirect competitors, I researched CRMs, marketing automation, workflow tools, project management software, collaboration platforms, and so much more.
UX activities
The Duplo Dashboard

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.

UX workshops

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.

User-centric

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.

Still with me?

Here comes the good stuff.

Design process

Information Architecture
Step 1: Audit the current system

It seemed like an impossible task. There are layers of mega-menus with ~190 links.
Each product had different patterns, components and behaviors.

Step 2

Rebuild the current navigation in Sketch. I believe it was over 190 links in the current global navigation.

Step 3

Categorize and color code. Find overlapping themes.

Step 4

Grouping exercises. Getting a feel for the nesting hierarchy.

Step 5

Started the new IA in Excel for speed and efficiency.

Card Sort

We ran a card sort activity with ~50 users on the Event Object IA.

Global Navigation IA

Here's the new IA for the global navigation.

Tree test

A tree test was performed on the Global IA with 35 users.

Event Object IA

Here's the new IA for the Event object.

Navigation & wayfinding
nested path exploration
Nav Variant #2
Nav Variant #4
Nav Variant #9
menu iterations
Event hub iterations
Event Object iterations

Validation

Prototype
Ecosystem Samples

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.

User testing

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 easy to use. I can finally understand everything. When can I have it!?"

Zooming in

Detailed specs

View specs for a few of the pieces of the Ecosystem.

Epilogue

Outcomes & impact
  • A flag in the sand
    The Ecosystem became a guidepost for the company to strive for in 3-5 years. Product teams could leverage that vision to make decisions on what to build, how to prioritize, and how things fit together.
  • New projects
    The Ecosystem initiative spawned a bunch of high-priority projects, like the complete redesign of the Event core product, the RFP product, global navigation and more.
  • Refreshing the brand
    Cvent contracted the design agency Landor to help us come up with the new direction for the brand. I worked closely with them, and the direction that was eventually decided on was directly influenced by the Ecosystem.
  • Guiding the Design System
    The system of hierarchy, IA, page templates, object complexity model, patterns and components that I worked on all became a part of Cvent’s Carina Design System.
Recognition

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.

Key takeaway
The Experience Vision

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.

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