Overview
Pebble is an event management app that helps event organizers connect with and manage sellers for their events.
During my internship there, I redesigned the event registration process for marketplace sellers to increase registration rates and drive event discovery.
Outcomes
📈 25% increase in completed registrations from marketplace sellers
📋 Customizable registration form for event planners
🤑 Additional monetization channel for event planners through paid registrations
Problem
After finding success at a couple of local festivals, the Pebble team decided to scale the app and expand it to a wider audience of event planners.
However, event planners using Pebble found that some of them were not getting as many registration as expected.
This is a problem that affects the Pebble's two core user groups:
Event Organizers
Without enough sellers registering for their events, organizers may not be able to meet their targets and host successful events. As one of the app's main revenue sources, their problems also directly affect Pebble's bottom line.
Marketplace Sellers
Many independent business owners look towards marketplaces and pop-up events as a source of revenue, and if they are not able to get approved for events, they will be unable to grow their business.
Discovery
To find out what could be the cause, I audited the current state of the app with my team through some usability tests with marketplace sellers.
We found that the sellers had no problem searching for and discovering events in the app. However, there were a couple points of friction with the current registration process:
Unclear registration requirements
The form didn't specify requirements that needed to be met (e.g. uploaded documentation) in order for their registration to be considered.
Lack of feedback after form submission
Additional action needed to be taken by both the seller and organizer after submitting the form, but this isn't conveyed to the seller in a helpful way.
With these problems in mind, I set out to find an answer to the question:
How might we provide clearer requirements and feedback to help more sellers complete their registrations for events?
Design
When sketching out new iterations of the registration form, I split the form into multiple digestable steps to clearly highlight what requirements needed to be met for the seller to be approved.
The advantage of the previous registration form was the quick one-click process, so I preserved some of that by having basic detail be pre-loaded from the seller's profile, saving user dozens of clicks and keystrokes over multiple events.
Each event may have different registration requirements, so I added options for planners to include their own custom questions in the form.
After submitting registration, organizers needed to approve the sellers, after which the sellers would pay their registration fees. Previously, sellers had to manually log in and check the event pages that they registered for to see if they were approved or not. Now they are able to receive in-app and email/SMS notifications of their approval status.
Impact
After doing another set of usability tests with the updated registration flow, we found that 25% more participants were able to complete all of the registration steps and be approved for the event.
Additionally, 90% of the sellers reported that they found the registration process more clear and easy to follow through. On the other side of things, all of the event organizers we showed the new designs to appreciated having a way to add their own custom questions to the registration form.
Reflections
Due to development constraints, we were not able to integrate Stripe payments or email notifications to test the post-approval process of the registration. Given more time, I would have tested how sellers interacted with the approval notification from the event organizers.
I would have also tested how marketplace sellers went about paying registration fees to ensure there weren't any usability issues preventing event organizers from generating revenue via registration.
