Informa
Researched and designed a custom solution for Informa, able to generate deep insights about leads from various events across the world.
- Helped client pivot the product in a direction with more immediate value
- Defined the visual direction and designed the full experience
- Created a Design System
- Identified competitors and novel pain points
- Identified the Value Proposition
- Proposed a set of visual & interaction design principles for data visualisation
Primary Responsibilities
Visual and Interaction Design- Ideation, Sketches, Wireframes
- Prototyping
- Information Architecture
- Design System
Supporting work
Discovery Interviews- Evaluative Interviews / User Testing
- Building Personas and Journey Maps
- Market Research
- Competitor Analysis
Project Details
Duration: 6 months
Tools used: Miro, Figma, userinterviews.com, Google Sheets/Docs
Team structure: UX Designer, UX Researcher, Project Manager, Business Analyst
1.Understanding requirements and the industry landscape
Responsibilities
The client believed they were building in an empty market. They weren’t.
I mapped the platform’s original architecture (Fig 1) and traced how data actually moved — from the systems capturing raw attendee data at events to the one displaying leads (Fig 2). That map told us which data points mattered across an event’s lifecycle.
In parallel I ran a competitor analysis with the PM. Marketo, Oracle, Eloqua and CVent already did parts of this — scattered across suites offering far more than these customers needed (Fig 3). That gap defined the opening: a focused product, not another suite.
Supporting work
I helped the PM run a pre-mortem workshop with the client. It surfaced the question the entire project hinged on:
Other things to look out for:
- Platform must estimate with increased accuracy which leads have high chances of conversion.
- It should generate revenue from multiple sources not just in-person events.
- Weekly active users should be at least 60% of the user base i.e. enough paying customers.
- It needs to have a clear value proposition so that pricing won’t become the only differentiator.
- Customers should voice out proactively their feedback.
- Properly suited to multiple industries.
Outcome and learnings
- Got a good understanding of the current state of the platform
- Uncovered indirect competitors: Marketo, Eloqua, CVent
- Found out what were the expectations and fears of the key stakeholders
- Started to draft the research objectives and set up a research plan
- Got extra clarity around what to ask the stakeholders that weren’t directly involved but had valuable inputs.
2.Stakeholder interviews
Responsibilities
I co-wrote the interview script with the UX Researcher and sat in on every session, probing wherever an answer needed unpacking. Afterwards I documented each session from the recordings and synthesised the insights along with the UX Researcher.
Stakeholder Interviews insights:
- Automation
- Time to deliver reports: ideal real time reports
- Lack of guidance on how to use data and reports
- Two membership options:
- Basic
- Premium — helps them understand the data
- Monetise captured data
- Report delivery time
- Contract renewal rate
- Number of meetings initiated
- Exports
- Time on platform / engagement
- Number of touch points that are tracked
- Number of leads (ex. aligned interest prospects / attended event but did not interact with your company, lower accuracy)
- Aligned interest prospects (leads with similar profiles)
- Real time dashboard
- Continuous tracking: all the interactions with Informa not just the one event, all the different touch points. Identify opportunities to reconnect with existing contacts
- Mini-CRM
- Marketing (focused more on quantity)
- Sales (focused more on quality)
- Informa internal
Outcomes and learnings
- Better understanding of the industry and how each stakeholder envisioned the future of this product.
- Clarity around what to ask for in the Discovery Interviews with Informa customers.
- A set of possible functionality for the new product that we’d present to customers to gauge their level of desirability.
3.Discovery interviews
Preparing for interviews
The UX Researcher left the company mid-phase. I onboarded the new colleague that came onboard, handed over every finding to date, and kept the research moving, defining the objectives and drafting the Discovery script.
Research objectives:
- Platform or simple report?
- Mobile / Tablet / Desktop / App?
- Real time data feed or data delivered post event?
- We proposed 9 product features, with high-level descriptions for each, and assessed their level of desirability — as well as what would be valuable in a basic membership vs a premium one
- Top 3 for physical events
- Top 3 for virtual events
- The quality of leads currently provided by Alchemy
The client booked 7 sessions with existing customers. I ran 2 and supported the other 5, then documented each one from the recordings and converged on the key findings with the researcher.
Top insights:
- Difficult to adapt to virtual events
- GDPR issues when collecting data at events
- Even basic attendee information is hard to get
- Low networking opportunities with attendees during an event
- Difficult to measure ROI when sponsoring an event — lead quality is usually low
- Same general in-person event app, not each event with its own app
- Expectation was that since they already paid Informa to exhibit at events, the post-event data should be delivered as part of the contract
- Awareness of competition and industry trends
- Measuring the brand awareness
- Audience engagement with their content
- Networking opportunities initiated and conducted
- Lead quantity and quality
- Engagement at session attendance; audience rising / dropping rates (for virtual events); number of downloads; attendee pre-event expectations and feedback post-event; number of meetings and demos conducted; attendee demographics; booth attendance
Supporting work
After the Discovery Interviews, we built a User Journey Map covering 3 key stages (Pre-Event, During Event and Post-Event) for 5 identified user segments (Event attendees, Sponsor Marketing, Sponsor Sales, Informa Marketing, Informa Sales).
The most valuable segment was the Event Attendee. Sponsor Marketing (Informa Customer) would use the pre-event attendee data to help craft the necessary materials and messaging for the event, and Sponsor Sales (Informa Customer) will use that to gather as many quality leads as possible. Informa’s own teams were secondary (Informa Sales and Marketing). Everything after this point was designed mainly for the sponsor side.
Outcomes and learnings
- Good understanding of the needs and pain points of Informa’s customers and how those aligned / differed from Informa’s stakeholders
- Good understanding of the user segments and the stages they go through during an event lifecycle
- More clarity around the lifecycle of an event (physical and digital)
- Validation that a dashboard would be valuable if integrated with customers’ CRMs
- New strategies for the monetization of this platform
4.Ideation, information architecture and low fidelity prototyping
Responsibilities
I ran an ideation workshop with the internal team PM, UX Researcher and Business Analyst, to turn the research into product directions.
I merged the output into a single high-level information architecture, then iterated it through sketches from low to medium fidelity. Two months of research became a clickable prototype we could put in front of users (Fig 9–10).
Outcomes and learnings
- After 2 months of research work we had a concept prototype to test out with users
- Great overall team alignment due to working closely together, communicating and being transparent at all times
5.Evaluative interviews and final research findings
Responsibilities
A second researcher handover and slow client scheduling cost us weeks. Rather than wait, we moved recruitment to userinterviews.com and booked 7 sessions across 2 days. I worked to ensure continuity through the second handover, presenting the concept and carrying the research context forward so we wouldn’t lose too much time.
I refined the prototype with the new researcher and set the objectives:
- Test the clarity and assess the desirability of the concept.
- Test the global and local navigation.
- Further understand how Informa’s customers are evaluating the ROI when exhibiting at Informa events and how we can better meet their needs with this platform.
We managed to schedule 3 more interviews with Informa customers so we ended up doing 2 rounds of User Testing sessions, one with 7 recruited participants and another with the 3 customers from Informa to validate an updated prototype after feedback from the first round.
We analyzed the recordings and built the final findings report, prioritizing issues with a scoring system based on how often each one recurred across sessions. The client got a ranked list to act on, not a transcript (Fig 11–12).
Top insights:
- A dedicated app during the event to analyze live attendee data and engagement with the company
- Dashboard with post-event outputs but with integrations with the major CRM systems to pull the data
- Dedicated page presenting a person’s historical interaction with the company, top buying signals and rich attendee data
- Ability to use filters (by activity, job title, company, engagement, etc) to find strong leads
- People were excited about the concept and some expressed a desire to start paying for it as soon as possible
- Attendee lead score in relation to their company: engagement history
- Number of scheduled, conducted and cancelled meetings
- Number of resource downloads
- Attendee job titles and company affiliations
- Delimitation of physical vs virtual events performance data
Outcomes and learnings
- We had a validated concept as well as a proposed high-level roadmap to help the client start organizing their development phase
4.Visual and interaction design
With the concept validated, I owned the design phase end to end: the visual language, the high-fidelity UI across every major flow, and a Design System built to carry beyond this product. I also wrote data-visualization guidelines so the client’s team could keep dashboards consistent without me.
