Planning the future of phygital trade fairs
Service design | Concept generation


Just as the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic was coming to an end in the late spring of 2020, my team and I were asked to support our client transition from a physical only to a phygital trade fair experience by helping them with the definition of their users' and stakeholders' new before-, during- and after-exhibition journey and the design of some of its many touchpoints.
Services
Service design; UX design; Workshop conduction
Client
Leading trade fairs host
Challenge
Navigating through the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic was no easy feat for anyone, let alone for businesses whose life depends on people physically meeting and interacting in their premises.
Moreover, with no clear government indication on wether lockdown restrictions would be lifted and to what degree, it became extremely hard for trade fairs hosts to plan their activities ahead of the usual fairs season.
In this context, my team and I were asked to support the client in trying to develop a new trade fair experience that would allow them to host events both physically and digitally by building on the digital touchpoints already in place and developing new services in order to offer a full, end-to-end experience for each user involved.



Results
The final outcome of the intervention was the structuring of a new end-to-end customer journey supported by a constellation of digital services and touchpoints designed to support a variety of users in their before-, during- and after-exhibition experience, as well as the design of some of these touchpoints:
-
the template for an exhibition blog to engage visitors, press and exhibitors before, during and after the event;
-
a tool for the planning and conduction of online meetings between visitors and exhibitors, to be integrated in the exhibition website and in the exhibitors' administration portal;
-
a food-delivery in-exhibition service, supported by a responsive online platform, for both visitors and exhibitors;
-
a new smart catalog, to support exhibitors in showcasing their products as well as possible in a digital format.
Along with this support, I was also responsible of designing the concept of a new exhibition mobile app, that would help visitors to safely plan their journey ahead, by combining all of the above mentioned services and more into one place only, becoming the de-facto complete guide for all exhibitions to come.