CiscoIMPACT 2020
Cisco’s annual sales kick off brings over 20,000 sellers from 100 countries to learn, network, and engage.
Attendees, primarily account managers and systems engineers, seek an immersion in corporate vision, sales strategy, priorities, and go-to- market enablement, with the goal of increasing seller effectiveness, and deepening seller engagement.
21,500 Attendees
4 Days, 3 Geo Waves (APAC, EMEA, Americas)
August 24-27, 2020
Introduction
Once Covid-19 hit in 2020, Cisco decided to cancel their in-person sales kick off and replace it with a Virtual event platform. They collaborated with 3 agencies to bring a bespoke platform to life in under 6 months.
Our agency was responsible for strategy, Product and UX design. We had two other agencies handling brand/UI design and development.
My Impact
I led product and UX design for this bespoke platform.
At this point in the pandemic no other major tech company was trying to build their own event platform
Every decision I made was scrutinized by our clients and two other agencies
I advocated for and executing two very features that were very popular:
Persistent Agenda
Persona based Agenda builder
Successfully introduced two novelty immersive digital experiences:
Sales winner spotlight
Global login visualizer
Key results
21,500 attendees attended. Our original target was for 20,000 attendees
258,000 hours of training delivered. About 20% more than our initial target
4.5/5 satisfaction score at the end of the event.
Product highlights and deepdives
We built a comprehensive event platform that covered all aspects of a great event from Registration to content consumption to delivering moments of delight. Here are a few features I am particularly proud of:
Persistent agenda
Attendees wanted to check their agenda as often as possible. So we added a persistent agenda button on all pages to enable attendees to check and modify their agenda with ease.
Persona based agenda builder
Dynamic home page
The home page was designed to be a living breathing space to help you have a finger on the pulse. There was a section recommending live sessions at the top and a video feed with schedules programming and a live host to ensure engagement was high at all times.
Sales winner spotlight
The spotlight celebrates top sellers at IMPACT. Using the scroll on a mouse, attendees are able to fly-through Winners. Winners are arranged by achievement level. By clicking on an avatar, you could send a custom congratulations message, our virtual high-five, stimulating organic networking
Global activity
To give attendees the feeling of gathering together as one at this digital destination, we visualized logins on the platform as a yellow dot on an interactive globe. Also, as attendees engaged more with the platform we had a few leaderboards to motivate each other.
Process
Research - Product/UX design - Develop - Test - Launch
Timeline
As mentioned earlier. This whole project came together in 6 months. Which was a pretty crazy and compressed timeline. But we got through it with grit, comradery and ruthless prioritization.
Audience research
As a part of our research we wanted to understand a few key things:
- Behavioral patterns
- Desired outcomes and actions
- Content consumption trends.
We went about this process by looking at old surveys and talking to a few users that represented some attendee archetypes.
Our insights from this process lead to the creation of three personas that went on to influence a lot of our product decisions as detailed below:
Journey Mapping
- Map attendee experience across time for our personas
- Focus on digital touchpoints pre, during and post event
- Identify pain points and opportunities to inform product decisions
UX wireframes
We made the decision to stay with Black and white wireframes for as long as possible so everyone could focus on functionality and not get distracted by visual design.
This worked great for us and saved a lot of time. Once we finalized everything in wireframes, it was skinned for visual design in one pass with very little review time.
