Case study · Events
Converse Experience.
Turning passive conference attendance into measurable, real-time audience engagement.
The challenge
Refinitiv ran four major APAC conferences a year, thousands of finance professionals in the room. But an offline event is a black box: leads captured by hand, sentiment invisible, engagement entirely passive. Once everyone went home, there was almost nothing to measure.
The project
A platform to read audience sentiment in real time and act on it, wiring the room to the operations running it. I ran stakeholder interviews and on-site research, designed both the attendee app and the operations dashboard, and gave hands-on support during live deployments across APAC.
Two interfaces that had to feel like one system
The attendee app and the operations dashboard had opposite jobs. Attendees needed a low-friction surface, join a poll, ask a question, react to a session. Event managers needed the opposite, density, trends, a live read across many sessions at once. Designing them separately was the risk: if they didn't share a data model, the operations view would show a different reality from what attendees were doing. We treated them as two views of one system from the start, same data layer, different density, so every attendee action mapped to something operations could surface in real time.
Check-in that works in a crowded lobby
Check-in was sign-in sheets and badge printing, slow at scale, lossy on lead data, and it bottlenecked at the worst moment, arrival, when patience is lowest. We replaced it with QR-based iPad scanning: register in advance, scan at the door, data captured automatically. The constraint was that it had to be self-explanatory for staff who weren't trained on it and attendees who weren't expecting it, so we ran it through on-site research and iterated before the first conference, not after.
Deployed onsite, iterated in real time
Most projects have a gap between design and deployment, feedback arriving weeks later. A live conference has no such gap: if something isn't working, thousands of people are hitting it now. Being onsite changed what the role meant. Interactions that read fine on a phone didn't read in a dim hall; labels clear in prototype turned ambiguous on the floor. I captured decisions and reasoning as they happened and fed them back before the next event, so by the final conference the first event's problems were resolved, not accumulated.
The platform captured real-time sentiment, automated lead collection, and gave event managers a live read on the room through a mobile-first interface. I stayed with it past design, on site at the APAC conferences as the advisor making the real-time calls when the plan met the reality of a live event.
- UIUX DesignerAttendee app and operations dashboard
- User ResearcherStakeholder interviews and onsite observation
- Onsite AdvisorLive support across APAC conferences