Website layouts
Cvent, an enterprise event technology company, has grown significantly over the past two decades and has become an industry leader. As the product has expanded, it has become increasingly challenging for event planners to learn the platform.
I led a project aiming to reduce the Time to Value for new accounts, helping users quickly and easily find value in Cvent's products as they create and plan events.
Context
The core Cvent product is used to plan large-scale events and conferences. It is sprawling, complicated, and difficult to learn. Onboarding support for new and existing accounts is lengthy and expensive.
I led a project to reduce the Time to Value for new accounts, helping users quickly and easily find value in Cvent's products as they create and plan events.
To address this broad issue, I collaborated with a user researcher to understand when and where new customers find value in our products. Based on our findings, we identified the event website as a great starting point for improving Time to Value because:
It is among the most used features of the event: over 90% of all events on the platform utilize a website. Thus, enhancing the website experience would impact a majority of our users.
Event planners often start working on the event website early on in a new event. Hence, improving the website-building experience would enable us to deliver value earlier in the customer journey.
Problem
Building a quality website from scratch is challenging, tedious, and repetitive.
Creating a unique event website is a crucial, early part of the event build. Even if users have previously designed a website they liked, the only way to retrieve it is by duplicating the entire event. After copying, it still demands hours of manual effort to adapt it for the new event.
It takes a lot of manual effort to assemble a website with existing tools.
Two early explorations on scale. What’s the right size to improve the workflow?
A happy path – when the user is able to use bigger tools to make bigger changes, they can make a great website quickly & easily.
Approach
I recognized early on that the solution needed to enhance both the ease of creating an event website and the quality of the final product.
To meet these goals, I designed a solution offering pre-built content templates that users could add to their event website.
This approach would facilitate the creation of high-quality websites and expedite the building process by allowing users to snap larger blocks of content into place before fine-tuning individual pieces.
Output
Layouts can be dragged & dropped easily into the canvas
Layouts can be saved and customized from the canvas
Layout styles can be adjusted to fit into the overall page structure
Section layouts are organized by what the user needs to communicate in the website.
Outcome
I presented the solution to product leadership, highlighting the key workflows, demonstrating the types of pre-built layouts we could provide, and walking through a storymap detailing how this project could evolve with further investment.
After getting buy-in from leadership, I refined designs based on feedback, and fleshed out the library of layouts to offer in our v1. Right now we’re conducting research to validate some key decisions, with plans to release in Q4 2024.
To measure efficiency, we’re looking at the number of actions/commits from initialization to launch. If the layouts are truly making it easier to build a website, we expect to see fewer edits and adjustments in the building process.
To measure website quality, we’re looking at attendee data – registration funnel and bounce rates. If layouts are improving the quality of event websites, we expect that attendees will respond positively.
Update — it’s live!
A simple website I put together in a few minutes in the live designer.
In December 2024, the sections feature was released to 20% of the user base. It received immediate and glowing feedback from users, so we progressively ramped up and released to all users over a few days.
In the proceeding weeks, we altered the designs based on user feedback (mostly navigation elements), re-organized some of the layouts, and received a green light to expand the feature by allowing users to save their own custom sections to the library.
Exciting times!
Updated navigation elements and folders.