MICE Portal
MICE Portal is one of the leading event portals in Germany and Europe, offering various software products for purchasing and organizing events in a B2B environment.
My responsibilities include:
- Running primary and secondary user research
- Developing customer journeys, wireframes, storyboards, screen flows & interactive prototypes
- Designing mobile-friendly User Interfaces – always with a human-first approach
- Maintaining and organizing our Design library, always having our brand identity in mind
- Working closely with technical stakeholders and developers
- Conducting usability testing
- Organizing and facilitating Design Thinking workshops
The old, the bad, the ugly
One of my favorite projects was the redesign of the series booking process. B2B customer service informed me that this process has a particularly high volume of requests from event managers as well as hotel staff: Users are not clear how to create and manage a serial booking, which often leads to frustration. Based on this, I conducted research to uncover the specific pain points. After initial interviews, the extent of the problem became clear and, together with Product Owner and IT, we decided to redesign the series booking process to make it more user-friendly – and human centered.
Initial research
I created a research plan, conducted user interviews and evaluated the feedback I received from my colleagues from B2B customer service. This allowed me to gather a number of valuable feedbacks that revealed crucial pain points and issues. To sum it up:
- „There are often so many buttons, I don’t know where to click“
- „The booking process takes a lot of time and is intransparent to me“
- „I have the feeling that the same information is often asked several times“
- „We would often have to make subsequent changes, which is not possible (at least we do not know how)
Customer Journey Mapping
Outlining the current processes and visualizing what our users / customers are experiencing in real time. This helped me connect with our customers and understand how I can prioritize the customer experience (CX)
User Flows
Working on a user flow canvas together with the IT department in order to figure out what path the customer currently takes – and how it could be improved. Where along the way are blockers or painpoints? Data from Google Analytics was very helpful here
Jobs to be done
Combining all research findings and feedback, I defined the following jobs to be done. As this project is about redesigning an existing process which was implemented before I had started at MICE Portal, the old solution was created based solely on technical needs, not respecting UI or UX principles.
Create a user friendly process. Needs to be clear and intuitive
Define a clear naming of terms: especially within the series booking process, this is crucial
Work closely with IT to find out which information provided by the user is needed and which is redundant
Make use of the data we collect
Wireframing
I sketched wireframes for both sides of the booking process: the event manager and the hotel staff – to get an idea of what the solution could look like. After discussing them with IT and PO I moved further to the actual User Interface Design.
User Testing
I conducted 5 sessions of moderated user tests using TestingTime & Usertests.com in order to see how users interact with the new prototype. As the software solution should be useful not only for users who are familiar with our product, I conducted the tests with randomly selected participants from all over Germany. Those tests helped me to see what worked well and what did not, and made it possible for me to refine my designs.
Feedback
The new tool is online by now and the project was a great success: we got lots of positive feedback from our customers on both sides.
During the next weeks we will closely monitor data via Google Analytics – and presume to see figures such as the bounce rate decline.
Another one
Booking Wizard
A different project, same approach: I redesigned our event booking process and made it intuitive & easy to use for our customers.
That’s why we called it the wizard! 🧙♂️
It seems the tool can read our customers mind – and guide them through the booking process in no time!
Check it out here
