Back in 2020, during the pandemic, Hopin was the first all-in-one live online events SaaS platform, that enabled attendees to connect, learn, and interact with people anywhere in the world. Organizers could host a live training workshop, a 50-person meetup or a 50,000-person conference. Attendees were able to network one-on-one, break out into group sessions, watch keynote presentations, send chat messages and polls, as well as explore expo areas.
Product Designer
I led the complete redesign of Networking experience during virtual events, resulting in a 165% increase in meaningful connections made, DM's sent, and meetings scheduled. I collaborated cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and engineers to help define product requirements and roadmap.
2020-2022
Networking feature paired two random people over a one-on-one 3 min video call and let them "Connect" to exchange email adress.
Networking matched relevant people based on their interests and goals. It became a subsection of "People" area where attendees could see connections recommendations or use filters to find the right person.
How to empower event attendees to make meaningful connections so they can grow their business, career and knowledge?
With the shift towards virtual and hybrid events, keeping attendees engaged has remained imperative to event success. Virtual networking has become increasingly important in helping attendees meet new people, but it was no easy feat. Lack of basic information about other attendees such as role, interests, intents, meeting availability or feeling unsecure while being on camera one-on-one with a stranger, were only few challenges we had to face.
Hopin started losing deals in favor of the competitors offering more advanced networking tools. The topic of virtual networking was a big unknown for me. How should I even start? I asked myself and the team about relevant data: Who are our customers? What our competitors offer? Who is our persona?
I conducted user interviews with people regularly participating in networking events. I identified key networking pain points such as lack of information about other attendee, awkwardness when starting a conversation and fear about not finding the common ground.
Top 3 goals mentioned by attendees joining virtual evenets were:
1
Grow career
Students looking to kick-start their career or people searching for new opportunities
2
Grow business
People who are trying to make new business connections or acquire knowledge which helps them expand their business
3
Grow knowledge
People who want to deepen their expertise about a subject they're interested in
I spoke to 10+ organizers to understood their needs, problems and expectations for networking. They felt that random matching or by ticket type was not sufficient for attendees to make meaningful connections, especially for bigger events. During the interviews I found out that common interests, job role and industry type were the key categories for matching people.
"More ability to match people based on an algorithm or their interests and just ticket type.
"Matching people in networking based on their interests or through an AI logic
"Have lots of organizers who wish to schedule meetings pre-event for their clients and sponsors. Right now they can only do this when the event is live.
"They mentioned scheduled meeting feature should be available before the event.
After discovery phase I reframed the problems and together with PM and EM we set apart five projects, that all together supported attendees in making better networking connections.
Those projects were mostly things we considered as "must have". More visionary work will be described in next chapter.
1
Speed Networking
Organizers can choose how to match people in speed networking session: random, by ticket type or by interests (smart matching).
2
Smart Matching
Organizers specify interest tags and set up specific matching rules. e.g. Vendors can't meet Vendors. Attendees fill in interest tags when joining pre-event.
3
People list and advanced filters
Organizers can enable a new "People area" section and speed networking. Attendees can filter attendees by interest tags in this section.
4
Meeting availability
Attendees can set their meeting availability based on segments added to their Agenda.
5
Privacy controls
Organizers can define general privacy settings rules and exclude certain ticket types from being contacted e.g. VIP.
I identified the full event experience journey together with Design team. In order to design great attendee experience it was crucial to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire product.
I lead couple of different workshops types (e.g. empathy map or brainwalking excercise) with engineers and designers to emphatize with attendees pain points and brainstorm ideas for the future of networking.
I came up with the customizable design solution for collecting profile & registration data that will power networking or any related feature such as e.g. smart recommendations of sessions to join or speakers to follow based on your profile interests
We needed profile data from attendees such as e.g. interests or job role to suggest people to meet, match relevant attendees together in speed networking based on similarities or create advanced filters in the people list...
Receive an email to check in
Fill out your profile interests, job title, industry while entering the event
View people suggested for you on reception
Enter People area and receive smart people suggestions
Find the right person to connect using search and advanced filters
Visit Profile and set your meeting availability
Send a message or schedule a meeting
Connect and set up follow-up time
I conducted iterative concept testing with 10 attendees and few organizers to validate the prototype and ideas which came up during workshops (like Group networking).
Key insights from organizers:
Key insights from attendess:
Attendee networking experience walkthrough (MVP - developed)
Attendee mobile web experience
Organizer's experience walkthrough:
networking settings in event dashboard (MVP - developed in 80%)
Watch Promo video made by Hopin support team about developed "People area" functionality
increase in meaningful connections made, DM's sent, and meetings scheduled
events enabled the People Area within 1st month after launch.
Networking ranked 5th favorite feature according to the organizers.
Events with People Area Enabled performed much better than events with only old Networking
Profile Suggestions had a big impact in terms of matching attendees together
Having some sort of predefined categories templates that organizers can choose from could increase categories/tags adoption.
Customers reviews about networking functionality
"As an attendee, the best feature for me would be Networking. It's probably the most missed thing from in-person events, and Hopin Networking gives you the next best alternative.
"The networking feature is also great as it allows attendees to see one another face to face. Simulating an in-person-style event."
"We use Hopin for hosting online conferences and chose the Hopin platform, over many others we looked at, because of the Networking feature. This feature allows attendees to meet face to face by video so they can meet other attendees at our events."
"What I like best was the comprehensive suite of high-quality tools that emulate the full conference experience. The main stage, breakout sessions, people area and Expo/Learning Zone. "
"The experience opportunities during the event were great - between integrations (like slido for trivia & syncwords for language closed captions) and the networking space, our attendees had the opportunity to engage in more than just our content. "
"We have used the platform for both virtual and hybrid events. both of which worked very well. The virtual booths were attractive and the networking was a great feature. "
I delivered the hi-fi designs for "People" area. The developed MVP was (unfortunately) much more limited than the initial designs.
The vision piece of People area contained two types of Networking: Speed Networking and Group Networking. It also offered Connections list, People "Saved for later", People recommended for you with filters and possibility to create categories and matching rules e.g. "Job Seeker" can meet with "Recruiter". In the determined and developed scope for MVP most of the functionalities, apart from Speed Networking and People list with advanced filters, as well as creating categories were not included. Engineers planned to add those parts in the next Sprints. Here is the full list of features included in the initial (ideal) networking design:
People area
Speed Networking
Group Networking
Profile settings and meeting availability
Organizer People area settings
Setting up profile interests categories
Setting up profile interests matching rules
I've learned a lot about product development, product design thinking, smart management and market instability. Whom You Work for Matters to Your Success.
I was lucky enough to work with the best designers, managers and engineers: smart, fast, flexible, and truly empathetic toward their colleagues, no matter of fully remote environment and different locations. I found out that providing context and being more transparent is critical when talking to your team, especially people outside your team. I've also learned that cross-team collaboration is very helpful but also could be challenging, especially when working in a startup company going through hyper-growth.
The company environment wasn't easy itself due to a lack of research resources, proper leadership, aligned vision and constantly changing priorities.
First of all, I think that we focused too often on delivering features requested by single bigger client, rather than solving real attendees pain points. Within my work, I think I will push more for broader research support, cross-team collaboration and communication. Sometimes I had to solve certain problems alone, often too long, creating similar results to other designers. Why didn't we work together? Another thing was the lack of proper Design System components. I wish I could support other designers more often in developing the DS and learn from them. All that being said, I think that having an opportunity to design the virtual networking experience and work among other great designers, PMs and engineers at Hopin, was an amazing journey I will never forget.
