Vstage · remote · a startup, and most of the design function
An industry lost its venue overnight. What it did not lose was the brand on the door.
In 2020 every conference, festival and members' congress was cancelled at once, and the whole field had to work out how to hold an event without a room. Vstage was built for that: a platform companies, festivals and associations could run their events on.
But nobody wants to attend a Vstage event. They want to attend yours. A Christmas party, a trade fair and a music festival have almost nothing in common, and every one of them has to feel like itself rather than like our software.
Vstage was delivering that by hand. The team built each event from the requirements up, loading the visuals and the attendee list, adding features a client asked for. It looked like a product and ran like an agency, and the cost of the next event was the cost of the last one.
Who is actually running these events
Not an events professional. An HR manager with a day job.
Fifteen organiser interviews produced one persona that mattered more than the rest, because she is who the buyers kept describing. Everything on this page follows from her being busy somewhere else.
Runs internal events
Dublin, hybrid
"Running the event is not my job. It is the thing on top of my job."
Scenario
- Responsible for organising internal events at a fintech company
- Wants to deliver a successful event while managing her other responsibilities
- Two or three events a year, none of them the same shape
Goals
- Choose the right online event platform
- Deliver the best online event for her company
- Manage tasks without losing focus on everything else
Motivation
- The accomplishment of delivering a successful event for her company, and being seen to have done it
Pain points
- Minimise the time spent organising, without the event running badly
- Cannot produce a report that shows whether the event worked
Tools she already has open
- Slides
- Spreadsheet
- Calendar
- Slack
- The HR system
Comfortable with
- Booking systems
- Survey tools
- Not: streaming
- Not: analytics
And what the market was missing
Five gaps, and the interviews found two of them unprompted.
A competitor sweep across the platforms organisers were already using turned up five weaknesses. Two came straight back out of the interviews without anyone being asked about them, which is the closest thing research gives you to a straight answer.
The third theme is the one no competitor was talking about. An event happens once, at a fixed time, in front of everybody. There is no version of it you get to fix afterwards, so organisers were not asking for more features. They were asking to be certain.
What the job actually was
In a startup the role is a job title. The work is whatever is missing.
I joined as the design function, and for most of two years that meant design plus the things nobody else had time for. That is not a complaint, it is the reason the work is worth showing: the decisions on this page are product decisions, not screen decisions, because there was nobody else to make them.
The artefacts
Four of them, because these are the four that changed a decision.
Personas, journeys, competitor and analytics analysis, information architecture, a design system, prototypes. The list is the ordinary one. What matters is which of them actually moved something, so here are the four that did, and what each one settled.
Before, after, and the thing in the middle
Two screens from the product, and the check running underneath one of them.
The product turned inside out: instead of us applying a brand, the organiser applies their own, and instead of us assembling a report, the platform produces it. These two are the real screens.
A four-step wizard replacing a requirements call, a design pass and a build. Information, branding, stages, authentication.
Design systemTeamSettings
Branding is step two, not step four. It is the part an organiser is anxious about, and settling it early makes the rest of the wizard feel like admin rather than risk.
Constraints on the upload, not after it. The dropzone states the format, the ceiling and the ideal size before a file is chosen. A logo rejected after upload is a support ticket, and support tickets were one of the two numbers this project was measured on.
The preview checks contrast as you pick. Hand somebody a colour picker and they will eventually choose something nobody can read, and the event it breaks is theirs. Try the pale one above: it fails against the surfaces it would actually be used on, before the event exists.
Attendance, behaviour, support, devices, feedback and guests in one place, instead of five exports and a deck.
ChatDesign systemSettings
Six views, one event. Splitting them is what makes each one downloadable, and downloadable is what Orla needed, because the report is the thing she takes to whoever signs off next year's budget.
Engagement is shaped, not totalled. A single figure for reactions tells an organiser nothing. The curve across the run of the day tells them which session held the room and which one lost it, which is the only version of this number anybody can act on.
Average watched sits next to duration. Eighty-five per cent of a two-minute visit is not the same as eighty-five per cent of forty-two minutes, so neither number is ever shown on its own.
Everything above exists so that a few thousand people can be in the same place at the same time. That part is embedded in the event, never in a modal.
The player sits in the page. An event is a room you are in. A modal is a thing you dismiss, and dismissing it drops you out of the room, away from the chat and the people you came for.
It plays on a click, not on arrival. Nothing is requested from Vimeo until the film is asked for, so a reader who never presses play never meets a third party on this page.
What changed
The work moved from us to them, and the numbers followed.
Three worldwide events ran on it, with more than 26,000 attendees between them. The two figures below were the first two measures the project defined, agreed before the work started rather than chosen afterwards because they looked good.
Half the time to stand an event up, because the organiser was no longer waiting on a designer to apply their brand for them.
A third fewer, from the same change. Most of what support handled had been organisers asking us to alter something they could not reach themselves.
The full measure set. The two in green are the ones above: