Food & Wine | New Event Page Discovery & Build — UX Design

Client
Food & Wine Marketing team

Role
UX Designer, Information Architect, UX Researcher, Developer

Problem
The Food & Wine | Classic In Aspen marketing team asked for a new user experience and new microsite to drive more users to the scheduler and speaker pages on the FW Aspen event.

Challenge

previous website used Coldfusion and was built on a defunct older version of the CMS; only some screenshots were available
there was no qualitative research on customers available
there was concern with using newer javascript frameworks with the new in-house CMS for the microsite

Results
I wireframed and programmed a microsite with Backbone.js and Handlebars.js. Those frameworks supported the interactions that were originally planned without issues building in the CMS environment. This solution was later used for the live site. The marketing team shared some user feedback, and event attendees reported that the system was helpful.

Research & Wireframes

Discovery & Wireframes
I consulted other frontend engineers on the technical capabilities to see what could be built on the existing CMS platform. I reviewed Google Analytics data and researched other online event websites. Then sketched and wireframed possible pages for the microsite.
Tools Used
Balsamiq

Prototyping

Development

jQuery and Backbone.js were the best solutions for the Speakers and the Scheduler pages to work with the existing in-house CMS platform.
Tools Used
jQuery, Backbone.js, Handlebars.js, HTML, CSS

Reflection
The marketing and development teams received the site well. There were a few suggestions made for future microsites since this was an annual event:

Track the project's success in the future, use custom Google analytical tags and additional metrics for tracking interactions.
Offer a short questionnaire to learn and measure site usability
Collect - with permission - contact emails to schedule user interviews to learn more about the audience's needs and their goals each year