Why Do We Keep Designing Event Technology Around Organizers Instead of Events?
An event can run perfectly well behind the scenes and still be surprisingly difficult to attend.
The short answer: Event technology is often judged by what organizers can manage, not by what attendees can accomplish. A working registration system, event app, or venue map doesn’t necessarily mean people are having an easier experience.
Imagine arriving at a conference where everything appears to be running smoothly.
Registration numbers are healthy. Check-in counters are staffed. The event app is live, and sessions are starting on time.
But you’ve arrived at the wrong entrance. Your confirmation email doesn’t make it particularly clear where to collect your badge, and the event app has quite a few features you’re not sure you’ll need.
Nothing has actually gone wrong.
Yet you’re already spending more time figuring things out than you expected.
I’ve been thinking about how often we evaluate event technology from the organizer’s side of the experience.
Can the team manage registrations? Send notifications? Publish an agenda? Track attendance?
All important questions.
But they don’t necessarily tell us whether attending the event feels straightforward.
A working feature isn’t necessarily a useful experience
Take an event app with an interactive venue map.
The map is accurate. Every room is labeled, and attendees can open it whenever they need directions.
From a software perspective, the feature works.
But people keep stopping staff members to ask where particular rooms are.
Why?
Maybe the room names on the map don’t match the signs inside the venue. Maybe the map is difficult to find. Or perhaps attendees need directions from where they’re standing, not a complete floor plan they have to interpret themselves.
The point isn’t that the technology is bad.
It’s that we sometimes stop evaluating a feature once we’ve established that it works.
What we really wanted was for people to find their way around the venue.
Those are different measures of success.
I think this distinction becomes particularly important as event platforms offer more ways to personalize and manage the attendee experience.
More capabilities give organizers more options. But they’re not automatically making the event easier for someone to attend.
We’re measuring what’s convenient
It’s relatively easy to measure operational performance.
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We know how many people registered, how quickly they checked in, and how many downloaded the app.
Those numbers are useful. I wouldn’t suggest ignoring them.
But they tell us more about what happened inside the system than what the experience felt like.
Someone downloading an event app doesn’t mean they found it helpful.
Opening the agenda doesn’t tell us whether they found the right session.
And an attendee who successfully checks in might still have no idea where to go next.
Google’s HEART framework for user experience measurement includes a concept called task success. It’s a useful way to think about this.
Rather than measuring only whether someone used a feature, we can examine whether they accomplished what they were trying to do.
For an attendee, that might be finding an appropriate session, locating a room, or connecting with someone they wanted to meet.
It’s a small shift in perspective, but it changes the questions we ask about technology.
Sometimes the answer isn’t more technology
This is where I think event organizers have an advantage over people designing purely digital experiences.
An event happens in a physical environment. There are people, signs, staff members, rooms, conversations, and dozens of other ways to help someone.
If attendees repeatedly struggle to find a session room, improving the app might be the right answer.
But perhaps clearer signage would solve the problem faster.
If people aren’t using the networking feature, it might need better design. Or perhaps they need a more thoughtful introduction to the people worth meeting.
There’s no reason to assume every attendee problem requires another digital feature.
I’d be interested in seeing more event teams evaluate the experience before deciding which technology needs improving.
What are attendees trying to accomplish? Where are they getting confused? What information do they need at that particular moment?
Those questions can lead to very different solutions.
The attendee doesn’t need to understand our systems
An event organizer has to think about departments, vendors, schedules, responsibilities, and platforms.
An attendee generally doesn’t.
They shouldn’t need to know whether their problem belongs to registration, event operations, or technical support.
They just want to get where they’re going, participate in something worthwhile, and make good use of their time.
Perhaps that’s what we should expect from good event technology.
Not necessarily more features or fewer clicks on an organizer’s dashboard.
Just an experience where people don’t have to think so much about how everything works.
Because the easier an event is to navigate, the more attention attendees can give to why they came in the first place.
