Informa — Adrian Harja

Informa Markets organizes events and trade shows for various industries such as Agriculture, Aviation, Art, Energy, Healthcare. They wanted to understand how to provide more value to their corporate customers, after an event has ended such as quality leads that have a high probability of conversion.

Brief

“Design a new B2B product that customers will pay extra for. We’re first to market.”

What it became

A product and business pivot around what the evidence actually said.

Impact for business

The premium data tier was cancelled before build. Revenue moved from charging twice for the same event to charging for the analysis.

Impact for users

Customers stopped being sold data they’d already paid for, and got the thing they kept asking for: one view of a lead’s full history.

They weren’t first to market

Four established platforms already did pieces of their idea, buried under features these customers didn’t want.
So we stopped competing on feature count and defined value by insight quality instead.

The original platform

I mapped the platform’s original architecture, then traced how data moved across the wider ecosystem, from the systems capturing raw attendee data at an event to the one displaying leads. That showed which data points mattered across an event’s lifecycle, and where they were being lost.

Competitor analysis

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. That gap defined the opening: a focused product, not another suite.

Pre-mortem workshop

During a pre-mortem workshop with the client, we managed to surface the question the whole project hinged on: “Is it viable to make it more than a simple dashboard where customers only export the data?” It also set the bar for success: more accurate signals of which leads convert, revenue beyond in-person events, and weekly active users at 60% or more of the user base.

Diagram of the platform and the ecosystem around it

Breakdown of the original platform, annotated

Nobody would pay extra

Customers had already paid to exhibit. In their view the post-event data was part of that. The premium tier died in discovery, and the revenue model moved with it.

Discovery research

We ran two rounds of research. First, 9 stakeholder interviews across sales, marketing and customer care. Then 7 discovery interviews with existing customers: I ran two, supported five, and documented every session from the recordings before converging on findings with the researcher.

Gathering insights

The sessions kept returning to one expectation: customers already paid Informa to exhibit, so post-event data should come with the contract. Low lead quality made the return on sponsoring hard to measure. Exhibitors also struggled to get basic attendee data under GDPR, to measure brand engagement, and to balance lead quantity with quality. A premium tier would not sell.

Mapping the journey

I helped the UX Researcher to map the three stages (pre-event, during the event and post-event) for five user segments: attendees, sponsor marketing, sponsor sales, Informa marketing and Informa sales. Attendees were the most valuable segment, so everything after this point was designed mainly for the sponsor side.

Workshop board of client pain points and top data points

It was never a dashboard

In testing, people leaned forward at the lead profile, one person’s full history with the company and the buying signals inside it. It became the centre of the product. The dashboard became the way in.

Ideation and prototyping

To kick off the solutioning phase, I ran an ideation session with the PM, researcher and business analyst to surface out as many ideas as possible and merged the output into a clickable prototype after two months of research.

User testing

A second researcher handover and slow client scheduling had cost us weeks, so we moved recruitment to userinterviews.com and booked 7 sessions across 2 days and some extra 3 sessions with Informa customers. Findings were scored by how often each issue came up, giving the client a ranked list to act on.

Gathering insights

People wanted a powerful lead analysis tool: a person’s historical interaction with the company and their top buying signals, with filters by activity, job title, company and engagement to find strong leads. Some wanted to start paying for it as soon as possible.

High level architecture of our insights from the discovery phase

High-level architecture, sponsor and exhibitor

My first go on structuring the information into Pre / During / Post Event Dashboard

Preview of some ideas for the product during the ideation session with my team

Wireframes of the consolidated solution

Screens from the prototype that we prepared for the evaluative phase

Prototype 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 can we better meet their needs with this platform