Event management and networking website
UX design ▪ Case study ▪ Personal Project
How might we help people find the right people to network with in online events?
UX designer
December 2022
Project background
Networking is hard. You know it, I know it, and all people on LinkedIn know it. People feel awkward just casually walking up to strangers and striking up a conversation with them, or DMing them on social media.
It’s hard to break the ice, and even when you do it, it’s hard to maintain a conversation.
Covid-19 pandemic has influenced us more than we can imagine. Most of us want to continue to work remotely and keep our work relationships online.
So what happens to networking at online events? How can we expand our professional network?
Networking is a key ingredient for professional progress. But many people avoid it because it can be awkward to talk to the strangers, online or in real life. This is a problem as it can prevent full professional growth.
User research
Since this was a personal project, I decided to do a thorough secondary research about networking at events, people’s behaviors, struggles, and pain points.
I used literature reviews, business articles, social media platforms like Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc., and search listening tools like Answer The Public.
The questions that people have answered regarding networking:
❓ What is the most difficult thing about networking?
❓ Why is networking hard?
❓ How do you feel about networking?
❓ What was your experience about professional networking?
I gathered all the data together to organize and analyze.
I created an affinity map to organize my findings and map out the frequent patterns that resulted in defining the main user pain points.
I identified 3 main pain points. Users want answers to 3 important questions:
🎯 Are the right people that I want to network with there?
🎯 How do I start a conversation? What should I talk about?
Market research
I conducted a SWOT analysis of competitors to see the solutions in the market and analyze them. I analyzed 3 direct (Eventbrite, Meetup, Kommunity) and 2 indirect (Hopin, Bumble Bizz) competitors.
Top 3 things that I’ve learned:
Here is the link to the SWOT analysis.
POV statement
As an employee, I want to be able to network with others easily so that I can progress professionally.
define, ideate, design
Between the main pain points that I found out during the user research, I had to choose one of them for building an MVP.
The first problem seemed to be a good fit to the market opportunity that I found. That was when I came up with the problem statement.
Based on the results of the competitive assessment, I realized that the most important feature that determines the main approach of the platform is the “Sign up process”.
I figured that if I wanted to define the core value of the product for building an MVP, I should work on redesigning the sign up process.
I ideated different solutions for this problem using these “How might we..?” questions:
I brainstormed the potential solutions and came up with the TwinUp process.
This process comprises of 6 questions to help users find the right people to network with at online events.
I started designing the functionality of the website by designing lofi wriefrrames.
These are a few screens from this phase:
Final product
Based on the results of the TwinUp process, users can choose the events based on main factors that is shown on the event card:
None of the competitors have considered price to be a factor in the decision making process of the users. They also offer different suggestion systems like the organizer’s name, the number of attendees, etc.
What is the success metric?
Since this is a personal project, there is no way to measure success except for testing with people to see what they think about it. Which I did with 5 users and they were interested.
But if this product was built for real, this is how I would measure the success of the TwinUp process:
User engagement metrics like:
Usability metrics like:
