Description: AWS runs a global portfolio of events for hundreds of thousands of customers, from small, free regional summits to reInvent, its flagship conference drawing over 50,000 attendees. I led product and UX design for the Event Management Platform, a SaaS platform built to handle registration, session management, onsite check-ins, sponsorships and more across every surface an event touches: attendee registration and the attendee portal, an event owner console for the marketing staff running each event, and onsite check-in kiosks. The plan was to first roll the platform out internally across AWS's own global event calendar, replacing the patchwork of third-party tools different regions had been using, before productizing it for external sale.
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM BEING SOLVED?
AWS marketing ran events on a mix of different, disconnected event management platforms depending on the event and the region. That fragmentation produced wildly inconsistant experiences for attendees and a disjointed, inefficient management experience for the marketing staff running each event, on top of a set of recurring technical and accessibility issues:
Attendees were not able to register for events easily on mobile devices
Events from different regions and platforms had inconsistant branding and user experiences, with no shared design system
The registration experience was insecure and not fully accessible
Poorly designed, one-off forms led to costly customer support escalations
The forms below show how differently the same kind of registration experience could look depending on which platform and region built it.
WHO ARE WE SOLVING IT FOR?
The platform needed to work for several distinct groups sharing the same underlying system:
Attendees registering for and navigating events, from a free local summit to reInvent
Event owners and marketing staff building and managing registration for each event, who needed one consistant set of form-building tools instead of ad hoc solutions per region
Onsite event staff checking attendees in
Once productized, external AWS customers running their own events on the platform
Mapping each stakeholder's touchpoints with the platform.
HOW WE SOLVED IT
I approached the redesign end to end: research and requirements gathering, flow definition, whiteboarding and wireframing, and delivery on a shared design system, to replace the patchwork of regional tools with one consistant platform and set of experiences.
Research & Data → Flows → Whiteboarding & Wires → Design System
Research & Data Collection
I oversaw several methods of data collection and user feedback from event attendees. This included incentivized surveys, user interviews, and the planning of analytics for the mobile apps and websites.
Research also covered best practices for designing simple yet powerful form builders.
Concluding this phase were a series of in-person and phone interviews with stakeholders across the attendee, event owner and onsite groups.
Flows
With research complete, I defined the two flows that mattered most: the event owner building and managing a registration form, and the general attendee completing one.
Defining the Event Owner flow
Defining the General Attendee flow
Whiteboarding & Wireframes
I led whiteboarding sessions to gain consensus on the designs we needed to develop.
When needed I developed high fidelity wires with success and error states.
Design System
Leadership made the decision to build on Polaris, the same AWS design system used as the core of many of the organization's leading cloud products.
There were trade offs in that decision but despite the creative constraints I believed we could still deliver a high quality user experience. In addition leveraging the in-house design system
Seamlessly supported responsiveness and localization
Helped us deliver accessibility compliant with WCAG 2.0
Allowed the team to focus on delivering higher impact features
Gave us the benefit of usability and research data
Above you can see the accessibility score measured by Google Lighthouse for the AWS Hong Kong Summit. If even one customer with accessibility needs can't complete and manage an event registration then we haven't delivered a good experience.
WHAT WE LAUNCHED
In early 2019 we launched the first phase of the Event Management Platform at the Hong Kong Summit.
Unified Event Attendee Registration
Attendee Portal & Email
Onsite Check-in Kiosk
In 2020 the platform and form builder scaled to power several more events across AWS's global calendar, starting with the San Francisco and Hong Kong Summits
Event Owner Dashboard
And concluding with the marquee event, reInvent.
Having proven the platform across AWS's own global event calendar, the next step was exploring productizing it for external customers.
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