IEEE Event Management

I started with what I could measure cheaply: an audit of the existing site, four weeks of attendance records, and 11 conversations with members across freshman, junior, and grad-student cohorts. I wanted to know not just whether students were showing up, but where they fell off the funnel.

Three patterns kept surfacing: students learned about events 24–48 hours too late; nobody trusted the dates because the site contradicted itself; and the people running the chapter felt invisible — there was no easy way to know who to ask about the robotics workshop versus the resume night.

Affinity mapping pulled three jobs-to-be-done out of the noise: 'help me decide if this event is worth my Tuesday night,' 'remind me before I forget,' and 'tell me who's behind this so I can go say hi.' We built two primary personas — a curious freshman and an over-committed senior — and mapped a journey for each.

The biggest unlock was reframing the homepage as a calendar, not a marketing brochure. Students didn't want to be sold the chapter; they wanted to scan what was happening this week.

I built the system in Figma against an 8-pt grid with a four-step type scale and a focused palette borrowed from the IEEE brand but warmed up for a campus audience. Wireframes went through three rounds of feedback before any pixels got pushed.

Key flows: discover → event detail → RSVP, recap-after-event, officer directory, and an admin event-creation flow that the board could use without training. I prototyped the RSVP flow in Figma and tested it with 8 students; one round of changes cut the steps from 5 to 3.

I worked alongside the two developers in React, building the front-end shell and shipping the design tokens as CSS variables so the system stayed in sync. I owned QA on the first three sprints and we agreed on a definition-of-done that included a contrast check and a keyboard pass for every screen.

Launch happened the week before the fall kickoff event. Within 48 hours, the kickoff RSVP list was longer than the previous year's actual attendance.

The biggest lesson was that 'simpler' is a moving target. The first prototype tried to combine the calendar and the directory on one screen and tested badly — students wanted clear lanes. Trusting the research over the cleverness of the layout was the single best call I made on this project.