Event Management Dashboard
Our event dashboard had been using the same UI since the early 2000s, and it looked…old. The outdated UI created trust issues with prospects and risked customer retention. Inconsistent navigation and UI patterns across the platform were confusing users, but we needed to move quickly without a full UX overhaul.
My Role: Lead Product Designer
Team: 2 Developers
Scope: Platform-wide UI refresh + targeted UX improvements
Strategic Approach
Prioritization: After discussing with our CEO, we agreed to focus on UI modernization first to ship faster, while addressing critical UX issues where possible. I prioritized work in phases:
- External pages first (ticket buyer-facing) – highest revenue impact
- Dashboard pages (event host tools) – retention and satisfaction
- Design system implementation – long-term efficiency
Design System Decision: Rather than building from scratch, I advocated for Material Design to accelerate development and leverage familiar patterns for users. This enabled developers to build directly from specs without waiting for polished mockups – crucial for our small team.
Process: Created a comprehensive planning deck documenting each page, required updates, and white-label considerations to keep the project organized.
Key Design Decisions
Information Architecture Improvements:
- Shifted from list views to card-based layouts for better visual scanning
- Reduced image uploads from 3 to 1 (generated banner backgrounds programmatically)
- Added contextual metrics to dashboard pages for at-a-glance insights
- Redesigned event creation wizard with accordion layout for mobile/desktop consistency
UX Enhancements:
- Simplified event management – made status and key details visible without clicking through
- Improved event detail page utility with high-level metrics and quick tool access
- Enhanced sign-in experience with branded design for better first impressions
- Separated page elements with cards to clarify available actions
Responsive Design: Addressed major desktop/mobile discrepancies, particularly on event pages where experiences were significantly different.
Results & Impact
Customer Feedback: The event creation wizard updates were really well received by our customers – addressing longstanding confusion around copying events and completing drafts.
Development Efficiency: Design system implementation reduced development time by eliminating redundant component builds and enabling developers to work from standardized specs.
Business Impact: Modernized UI improved platform trust perception with prospects, supporting customer acquisition and retention goals.
Ticket Buyer Screenshots
Here are some screenshots of the new ticket-buyer-facing pages. The first image in each section shows the old version of the page.
Homepage
I wanted to make the browsing experience more visual, and make the search function more prominent on the page. The modular approach of event ‘cards’ also allowed us to offer additional customization to our private label customers if they want to add an ‘About’ section, for example.
Event Page
There was a huge discrepancy between our desktop and mobile experience for the events page. We also had 3 different image upload possibilities: event image, background, and banner. I wanted to reduce this down to 1 image upload to make the user’s life easier so we decided to programmatically generate a banner background by blurring the event image and making it darker.
Sign In/Up Page
The sign in and sign up pages are one of the first interactions users have with our site. I figured we could make a better first impression by branding the page with our colors (and offering our private label partners to do the same).
Dashboard Screenshots
Here are some screenshots of the new dashboard (login required pages). The first image in each section shows the old version of the page.
Manage Events
I wanted to make the event management page more visual, so I decided to modify the overall layout from a list to cards so individual events were easier to identify at a glance. I also designed the cards so you could easily identify various aspects of the event without having to click into the event itself. We had some challenges with the varying sizes of event images and ended up standardizing the size, which also helped with the event page.
Create Event
We re-crafted the event wizard so the desktop and mobile versions were more congruous with an accordion layout, and we also made some of the more confusing aspects of creating an event easier to understand, such as copying previous events, and completing drafts. It’s difficult to see the full effect of this one in a screenshot so I recommend checking out the video at the top of the page.
Event Detail
The event detail page wasn’t very useful, so we completely revamped it to provide all the important high-level details for an event, as well as providing quick access to relevant tools.
Analytics
The updates to the analytics page were largely cosmetic. We just modernized the UI.
Guests
I felt the guests page was missing some useful context around the key points of interest for an event host. So I added the key metrics to the top of the page, while updating the UI for the rest of the page elements.
Orders
Similar to the analytics page, I added the key metric to the top of the page, and re-designed the UI for the customer chart and search function.
Promote Event
On this page (and all pages), I decided to separate the page elements with cards to make it easier to differentiate the tasks available to complete.
Takeaways
Strategic constraints can work: It was difficult to set UX aside as we worked on this project, but focusing on UI allowed us to ship value faster. The small UX improvements we snuck in showed immediate customer appreciation, validating our approach.
Design systems pay dividends: While implementing Material Design felt like a compromise initially (I would have loved to design a custom system), the velocity gains and consistency improvements proved the right trade-off for a small team.
If I could do it again: I would have gathered baseline metrics on task completion rates and user satisfaction before the redesign. Post-launch quantitative data would strengthen the case for deeper UX improvements in future phases. I’d also conduct usability testing on the new event creation flow – while customer feedback was positive, testing would have caught any lingering friction points.
