Event Ability – Online Events Platform – STEPHEN JONES

Role

Concept Design
Prototyping
User Testing
Development
Entrepreneur?

Duration

1 Year+

Tools

Having designed and developed for conferences and exhibitions many times over the years I eventually put what I had learned in to creating an online platform that I offer to sale to events companies to help them create their online presence and run their events more efficiently. I set up the company Event Ability Ltd to distribute this.

The platform builds on top of the WordPress CMS to and allows for a variety optional functionality that users can setup and manage themselves. As well as a front-end website the system provides an easy to use backend event management system.

Conference Agendas

Poor usability within online agendas was an issue I can across time and again. The most valuable content a conference had to offer was most often difficult to navigate and opaque to potential customers and attendees.

Using the platform clients can add up speakers and assign them talks within an agenda and properly categorise them. Multiple of these agendas can be assigned to an event and then displayed in different ways.

The agendas become easily filterable by search and category and the user can easily navigate to the relevant information and the conference can highlight key sessions.

Attendees can display multiple agendas in a grid format so they can see what is going on in different rooms at the same time and decide where they need to be.

Attendees can add different talks to their own personal calendars to keep track of their day.

The agendas are designed to work across multiple devices and were created in REACT to allow for a progressive web app that can function offline in conferences where internet connections can be spotty.

Interactive Floorplans

Exhibition Management

Managing exhibitions was another area I often saw inefficiencies. Large sales teams arguing about who had sold what stand and working across different spreadsheets often led to costly errors.

By allowing the team to directly add exhibitors to the platform through the floorplan (reserving or confirming stands) spreadsheets can be eliminated and everyone on the team is always dealing with the most up to date information. The system can even do basic error reporting e.g if someone is assigned a stand that doesn’t exist or is double booked.

When turned on the sales team can use the “show taken” option to help potential customers identify the stands they want.

Attendee Perspective

Attendees in the meantime wanted to be able to easily and quickly navigate an exhibition hall but were reduced to looking up exhibitors in a list and searching for a corresponding stand number. Once the event decide to turn this tool on, attendees can easily search a list of exhibitors and highlight them on the interactive map.

Tickets and Event Registration

Having worked with events companies giving away tens of thousands of pounds a year to registration systems as a percentage fee I was keen to create my own system that alloed companies to create their own system sell tickets themselves for a fraction of the cost.

A ticket grid is easily created to list all of different ticket options for an event including offering multiple staged discounts such as “Early Bird” which is common within the events industry.

Data is key

Custom forms can be added to each ticket to collect relevant data about the users or to the order as a whole depending on what is most appropriate. Everything can be exported as a CSV to any other system.

Easy Messaging

The system includes a messaging system that can email tickets to attendees and also send out bulk messages to keep them updated.

Check-in system

Events can use a private “Check in” page at the actual event to keep track of everyone who arrives. Attendees can searched and ticket barcodes can be scanned to locate attendees and check them in. If a badge has been created in the badge design area and printers are setup badges for attendees can be printed out.