Event Planning Archetypes
Event Planning Personas
Splash | 2019
The blueprinting project I conducted on event planning leveled up a new understanding of who Splash’s power users really are. While previously the product team had been treating the designer as the primary user, working with our customers to document their workflows told us that just wasn’t the case.
I wanted to build on what we had learned during blueprinting and find a way to properly represent our users and their needs.
Methods
Blueprinting workshops
User Interviews
On-site event obsercation
Primary Research Questions
Who are Splash’s primary, secondary, and tertiary users?
On which part of the event-planning process do they focus?
How do they engage with other personas and with the platform?
Learnings
The personas and resulting recommendations were shared first with the CEO and then company-wide.
The blueprinting project leveled up our first three personas:
The operator, charged with planning and running the event from a tactical perspective.
The advisor, who leads a team—often of operators—and that focuses on an events program and its ROI.
The stakeholder, who is invested in the event and what it means for them or their business, but who is not involved in planning.
Then I conducted a series of user interviews and also attended a number of events to observe the process of hosting (and in some cases check in guests). This work leveled up two new personas:
The design producer, who is a marketer, team lead, or other role tasked with creating the look and feel of the event pages by working off Splash’s themes—but who is not a designer by trade.
The door worker, who is often not part of the team but is hired to run check-in at the event.
And while we kept the designer, this persona came to represent our in-house creative team rather than our end user.
Product Outcomes
This work had the most immediate impact on the CMS team, which began designing different modes that better serve the needs and skill sets of the design producer and operator personas instead of the designer personas. This made Splash look less like an advanced design tool and more like event planning software, thereby better suiting the needs of our users.
We also use them to:
Discuss who we want to be designing for (e.g. how might we get the stakeholder to update the guest list in Splash so the producer doesn’t have to?).
Recruit for research and tag research participants.
Make sure we’re running usability tests on the appropriate users.