Throwing Away The Community.

A ReDesigning Story.

For event organizers, providing event attendees with an online networking community is important for creating added value to event attendees.

Since event websites can vary greatly between events designing a community that fits many event websites is a big challenge. But when Boaz Katz, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Bizzabo suggested we redesign our old community page, I was excited. Although I was overloaded with other design projects, I was up to the challenge. It was about time we fixed our old looking event networking community.

But before I diving into the specifics, let me introduce myself. I’m Ben, Art Director at Bizzabo, and I’ll share with you how we redesigned our event networking community.

Since the project was primarily a design initiative, and didn’t involve a lot of new development, it was up to me from start to finish, Ironically, what was my first project at the company is now mine to throw away and make new.

Background

Launched in July 2012, Bizzabo is the world’s first event success platform. It helps organizers create successful events by empowering them to build amazing websites, sell tickets, grow communities, go mobile and maximize event experiences — using a beautiful, user friendly platform.

The community is where the event attendees engage, learn more about possible leads and set meetings. It’s a part of our event website editor, which provides event organizers with.7 different slick looking templates, though the old community incorporated the same old design no matter what template was selected.

When we first designed the community in late 2013 it was a stand alone product, so the design was not related to any other event page. The event organizer published a unique URL of the community and that was it. Back then the stand alone community was fine, but since we vastly expanded our whole product offering, we needed something more robust to compliment the new functionalities we are providing organizers.

Defining the Problems

Well, about everything:

1. Not Responsive, I don’t know how we made it so far without it.
2. No correlation between the design of the home page and the community page.
3. Outdated design overall.
4. Always blue. Even if you are Coca-cola and need it red, the community used to always be Bizzabo blue.

Starting the Process

At first I thought maybe we can save some time if we leave the page structure as is and just give it a few design touches.After a quick iteration when we realized that it’s not good enough and the whole thing is going to the trash.

Ok, starting the research, I always go to dribbble, Behance and Pinterest to get inspired.

I also learn how competitors and other platforms providing a similar functionality approach the product. This time the biggest inspiration came from the music world, platforms like MySpace, Spotify, Xbox Music, 8tracks and more have a great experience and I was inspired from each.

Sketch>Cmd N

Next step, many designers start their process on a whiteboard or paper, I go straight to the Mac, usually I have a vision of the final results in my mind but this time I had only 4 guidelines that I was going to follow:

Going wide — half of our users use a big screen to view the community, we have to give them the whole screen, but the mobile experience get’s the same attention now. Responsiveness, check.

Search center — in the old version of the networking community we had 3 places for filtering and searching. Now we’re replacing that confusing experience with the simple but powerful Search Center, which is accessible via a left menu that provides users with search options.

Brand awareness — The page gets the color & style from the event home page so now it will look like it’s part of the site.

Moving to cards — the community is a place of engagement, so I wanted to make it more fun, no more boring list views. Now the attendees are in the center, each one of them gets better visibility, more space and creates a smarter user experience.

Thanks to the perfect integration between Sketch and Invision the whole process was very quick, after 3 quick rounds inside the office, I got great feedback. Afterward, I shared my latest design with current Bizzabo users to get more feedback. The Bizzabo customers reported that they really enjoyed the new community.

Mission Completed, Zeplin helped me a lot with pushing it over to the dev team, I’m sure they’ll share their development story soon in another blog post :)