Cvent, Inc. – Attendee Hub – web & native app

About This Project

Attendee Hub is a Cvent, Inc. product which allows event planners to create an interactive experience for virtual, in-person, or hybrid events. Attendees can experience the event on device of choice, from desktop to a native mobile experience. Planners can create unique custom events including virtual or live-streamed sessions, event schedules, sponsors, virtual exhibitors, speaker and attendee lists, and a variety of interactive features including chat, live Q&A, live polling, 1:1 virtual meetings and more.

As a lead designer on this project, I was responsible for the areas of sponsorship and virtual exhibitors, and the interactive features of live Q&A and polling.

Attendee Hub was born in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our main attendee-facing product was a native mobile application for in-person events. In early spring of 2019, in-person events ceased to exist worldwide, and Cvent had no virtual event experience to offer. In a matter of months, a small team of ux, product, and dev teams took a small side web project and birthed it into a full-featured virtual event web experience. Fast-forward 3 months, we built out a full-function virtual event product which we used for our own annual event, Connect. What normally would be a 5,000 in-person event went fully virtual with over 35,000 attendees, using our own product as the maiden launch of Attendee Hub. No pressure there!

My responsibilities centered around creating a virtual booth for exhibitors, and designing and defining sponsorship placements in Attendee Hub. These are key areas which monetize any event and offset the event planner’s production expenses.

I was also tasked with implementing the Live Q&A feature which is used by attendees to ask questions in real time during sessions. This feature was already in development for the native app, but needed retooling/redesign to meet the needs of a virtual event in a desktop web application.

Additionally, I took my recently completed design for the live polling feature for the native app (which had not started development) and redesigned the feature for the primary use case of web/virtual event on desktop. This presented challenges in adapting the design to desktop without abandoning the original native app functionality.

During this early phase of Attendee Hub, we started with 3-5 designers manning this effort. I had 2 product teams of 4 product managers, and 5 sprint teams to support. The team rapidly grew to 11 designers in 6 months, and now stands at 20+ designers, and almost 200 people in total on this product alone. Attendee Hub has been developed more like a startup, than a Fortune 500 B2B software product.