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Marketing Essentials

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Role: Designer

Project focus: Sending invitations

Shipped: 2024

Problem

Effective event strategies heavily rely on reaching and engaging with a specific target audience. Organizers need the ability to precisely target their audience to maximize the impact of their efforts. 

However, the absence of the ability for organizers to target a specific audience poses significant challenges and hurdles.

Background

Cvent Event Essentials caters to low-complexity, high-frequency single-day events. The broader Cvent platform is designed for larger, complex events, resulting in an overwhelming user experience that complicates the setup of simple events and requires users to spend excessive time on unnecessary features.

Functional Requirements

  1. Import contacts

  2. Prevent certain audiences from registering (gating)

  3. Pre-register attendees

Goals

  1. Reduce friction for known target audiences to attend

  2. Allow planners to measure promotional impact so they can make necessary adjustments

  3. Streamline previously complex filters and statues

  4. Schedule emails

Personas

Administrator

  • Create rules in registration permission at the event template level.

  • Enable organizers to approve or deny registrations.

  • Allow organizers to select email, brand, badge, and other templates.

Event Organizer

  • Identify and apply promotional strategies to my attendees.

  • Approves or denies registration

  • Schedule the emails

Assumptions

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Working in collaboration with my Product manager, we sketched out our first idea of the workflow. A key decision point we highlighted was when the planner chooses to send these invitations. Was it before or after they imported their contacts? How early do they schedule these invitations? Do they customize these emails before taking any of these steps?

 

We quickly realized we needed to do some user research to answer these important questions.

Before

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After

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Overly complex, not what the user wanted. New workflow was cut in half and aligned with our research findings.

Research

  • Methodology
    Interview + Moderated Usability Test
30 min to answer questions 
    15 mins to use and react to the prototype.

    Participants
    7 Cvent customers who completed the Beta testing
Event types: Internal and external. Both personas: Admin and Creators
     
    Interview questions

    1. What are End User expectations/current practices for gathering registrants?

    2. What are Admin expectations/current practices for gathering registrants?

    3. What are Admin expectations for Address Book usage?
       

    Prototype questions

    1. Do users prefer to send now, later, or both options? 

    2. Does the content of the flows make sense to users? 

    3. Does the prototype meet their expectations?

  • We concluded from our user interviews that these were the steps our users took when sending invitations  

    • Step 1: Get the list

      • 7/7 chose import list

      • None use the Cvent address book to invite.

      • Their list comes a 3rd party “source of truth”

    • Step 2: Import

      • 7/7 avoided "send now" option when importing – need to finalize something first. 

      • One import is most common, but 4/7 mentioned multiple imports

    • Step 3: Send email

      • 6/7 invite instead of auto-register (1 always auto-registers)

      • 5/6 usually send manually ("send now")

Our solution

  1. Leveraging the existing import wizard significantly cut the dev effort. Changing and adding steps would increase project scope and time to deliver. Planners said they are almost never sending the invitation immediately anyway.

  2. Editing the email would exit them from the flow, and progress could not be saved.

  3. Planners really liked the idea of invitation tracker.

Deliverables

Invitation Status Tracker.png
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Reflection

Problem breakdown

  • A well-defined problem statement keeps conversations focused and prevents scope creep. 

  • I learned how to break down this project into incremental phases making it more manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable.

Frequent feedback

  • Catching misalignments or misunderstandings early prevents wasted time and resources. 

  • By testing our designs early, we were able to validate our assumptions.

Staying organized

  • Keeping my file organized with dates, action items, and dev notes made the dev hand-off process seamless.

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