Totem
Reducing event-day friction for Informa’s B2B event attendees
I designed key features for ConnectMe, an event platform used across Informa’s event portfolio, balancing fast attendee access with the organiser control needed to configure complex B2B events at scale.
Context
Background
ConnectMe is a white-label, multi-tenant event platform used primarily across Informa’s global events. I joined Totem after the MVP launch as a Product Designer in a 3-person design team, contributing to feature development across the attendee mobile app and organiser admin portal.
Challenge
Attendees needed fast access to the app in chaotic, high-pressure venues. Organisers needed deep configurability for different event formats, exhibitors, sponsors, and matchmaking rules. The challenge was giving organisers enough control to run complex B2B events without exposing that complexity to attendees on the day.
Research
As a design team, we attended around a dozen Informa events across Europe, observed live behaviour, spoke with attendees, and reviewed recurring support-desk feedback.
Around 40–50% of repeated on-site support questions related to login access, agenda-finding, and meeting visibility. These themes reflected what attendees needed most in the moment: where to go next, who they were meeting, and what had changed.
Highlights
Letting attendees enter before filling out profiles
The existing onboarding flow asked attendees to complete networking and matchmaking preferences before they could reach the app dashboard. That data was useful for matching, but it was not needed before someone could check the agenda or get oriented on-site.
As part of the design team, I helped move those fields into the profile area so attendees could enter first and complete networking preferences later. The revised flow reduced required onboarding fields, while profile completion stayed within 5% of the previous baseline.
Helping organisers set up better attendee matches
Many of Informa’s B2B events relied on complementary matching, such as investors meeting companies, buyers meeting suppliers, or sponsors meeting relevant attendees. Simple like-for-like matching would not work because the most valuable connection was often between two different types of attendee.
I contributed to admin-side design work that clarified how user groups, matchmaking questions, answer sets, and meeting settings shaped attendee recommendations. Clearer setup reduced the risk of generic matches and helped organisers configure matchmaking with more confidence.
Keeping upcoming meetings visible without hiding history
B2B event attendees needed to request, track, and manage meetings with different statuses, including pending, accepted, declined, cancelled, past, and rebooked. One of my key contributions was shaping early wireframes and prototypes that separated active meetings and pending actions from older meeting records.
This kept urgent meeting information visible while preserving the history attendees might need later. After rollout, meeting requests rose by roughly 35–45% as booking became available across more event formats and organisers gained visibility into request volume, acceptance, and attendance.
Helping attendees find their next session faster
The agenda was one of the most-used areas of the app, but attendees used it as a quick decision tool rather than something to browse slowly.
We redesigned the agenda around faster comparison, introducing clearer time-period sections and aligning session times to the left of each card. In observed walkthroughs, attendees identified their next relevant session around 30% faster without extra navigation or added visual weight.
Impact
Results
This was ongoing product work with shared ownership, so impact was tracked through rollout, platform analytics, support trends, organiser feedback, and observed behaviour.
ConnectMe continued rolling out across Informa events, meeting activity became trackable, and meeting volume increased as booking expanded across more event formats. Across comparable events, access and navigation support themes reduced by roughly 20–30%, while organiser setup questions around matchmaking reduced by roughly 15–20%.
Reflection
This project changed how I think about complexity in configurable platforms. The design work was less about adding features and more about deciding where effort belonged: profile data could wait until after access, active meetings needed priority over historical records, and organiser setup needed clearer guardrails before it affected attendees.
If I revisited the work, I would measure login success, time to first useful action, profile completion after entry, meeting request completion, recurring support themes, organiser setup errors, and match quality more deliberately.
Summary
ConnectMe brought organiser setup and attendee event tools into one platform, so decisions made before an event directly affected what attendees experienced on-site.
The design work balanced fast access, clear schedules, meeting visibility, matchmaking data, and organiser flexibility without treating those needs as separate problems.
The result was an event platform better matched to live-event behaviour, especially where delay, confusion, or poor setup created the greatest risk.