Case 03 of 04

Making sure people
actually turn up
to your event.

Greens offices were burning afternoons on one event publish. Stuff went wrong, the public calendar looked empty compared to real life, and new people dodged the old tool. Events Creator was: make publishing fast, obvious, and hard to screw up.

Year
2023
Role
Product Designer
Client
The Australian Greens
Outcome
Office staff workflow improved, volunteer engagement increased

01 / Problem

Getting an event live from a state office took way too long, and the mess didn’t stay in the office.

The old flow was a long internal path — easy to miss a field, save the wrong state, and zero hand-holding unless you’d already learned the hacks. New staff often didn’t touch it and bugged whoever’d been there forever, so know-how sat in like three people’s heads.

Volunteers bounced off the same UI. A lot bailed halfway, so staff retyped their details or cleaned up errors. Some events never hit the website, so the public view looked dead compared to what branches were actually running. Bad listings also meant people didn’t trust times or locations enough to show.

  • Creating or updating an event took too long for busy office teams.
  • Errors and incomplete entries meant rework, not just a quick publish.
  • Fewer events on the website than there were in real life, which hurt visibility and turnout.
  • New staff avoided the old tool, so onboarding and handover stayed fragile.

02 / Approach

The brief was blunt: offices need to publish correct events fast, and volunteers shouldn’t create more admin for staff when they try.

I lined up every field the org legally or operationally needed against how offices and branches actually work. One branch had already hacked a Microsoft Form for themselves — handy cheat sheet for “must-have vs legacy cruft.”

I also skimmed Humanitix, Facebook Events, Eventbrite, NationBuilder for the same create → tweak → publish muscle memory, so we weren’t inventing “internal-only” weirdness. Interviews got bucketed into Create, Manage, Search, then I cut, renamed, or reordered so each screen had one job.

Skipped months of grey boxes: jumped into a branded Figma library so eng and I were looking at the same UI early. ~Week of mid-fi testing, then a tight backlog and iteration on flow, copy, and field grouping each round.

  • Staff could see where each answer landed on the public page — less “why does it look like that?” after go-live.
  • Copy stayed human: you’re promoting a gig, not reading HR.
  • Linear steps with labels so new people weren’t dependent on whoever trained them last year.
Four things we kept repeating: plain language (you’re not an admin) · one skinny rail so the form stays wide · obvious step names in order · WYSIWYG-ish: builder layout tracks the live page so fields aren’t a mystery.
Creator page matching published page layout
Create flow mirrors the public layout so staff see where each field lands.
Published Greens event page
The live listing stays faithful to what you built in the creator.

03 / Outcome

Handover was a full dev-ready slice for the whole event lifecycle — built so offices could move faster and public pages looked less broken.

Dashboard, five-step create (Basic Info, Event Settings, Email Reminders, Fees and Finance, Publish), manage with RSVP/attendance, plus mobile check-in for who actually came. Ticketed flows that used to mean endless email with staff — volunteers could kick those off themselves while branches still had oversight.

Same components from draft through RSVPs so nothing felt like a different product in each mode; the kit’s reusable if they ship more Greens tools later.

  • Less time per event for office teams, with fewer fix-up rounds after publish.
  • More events making it onto the site in a shape people can actually share.
  • Easier path for new office staff instead of everything living in a few veterans’ heads.
  • Volunteers more likely to finish a create instead of handing half-done details to staff.
Manage Event dashboard
Manage view: RSVPs, attendance, and edits in one place.
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