Poppulo enterprise case study
Events
Unifying two divergent event types into one clear, configurable experience
Poppulo's Events module helps internal communicators plan, brand and track company events, from town halls to compliance training, with invites that land straight in employees' calendars. Years of customer feedback and market research pointed to the same root cause behind most of the complaints: two separate event types, Simple and Advanced, had grown up independently, each missing functionality the other had. I led the product design work to understand that problem properly and shape a single, configurable event experience to replace it.
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Timeline
- Discovery and design, 2026
- Product
- Poppulo Events module
- Tools
- Figma, Miro, customer interviews
About this project
Grounded in real product discovery
This case study draws on discovery work for Poppulo's Events module: customer interviews and support ticket themes gathered over several years, a structured competitor and market audit, and the requirements I helped define with product, engineering and architecture. The screens shown are concept work exploring the unified event experience that discovery pointed towards.
- Discovery inputs
- Customer interviews, support themes, competitor audit
- Core problem
- Two divergent event types, Simple and Advanced
- Primary users
- Internal Communicators
- Secondary users
- Employees receiving and responding to invites
- Status
- In active discovery and design
Project brief
The brief
Design a single, unified event creation and management experience for Poppulo's enterprise customers, replacing the confusing choice between Simple and Advanced events. The new experience needs to let internal communicators add exactly the capability they need, RSVP tracking, capacity limits, registration, branded calendar invites, without hitting a wall of missing functionality partway through, and give employees a calendar invite that stays accurate even after details change.
- Remove the Simple-versus-Advanced decision entirely, replacing it with one configurable event flow.
- Close long-standing functionality gaps, tentative RSVPs, waitlists, live editing, that had pushed customers towards workarounds.
- Bring proper rich text, hyperlinks and imagery to the ICS calendar invite description.
- Fix the everyday usability friction, confusing buttons, fragile time zones, one-off event names, driving a steady stream of support cases.
Challenge
Understanding the problem space
Choosing between two flawed options
Communicators had to decide upfront between Simple events, with uncapped audiences but no RSVP tracking, and Advanced events, with tracking and branding but no way to edit live or offer a tentative RSVP, a decision that often turned out wrong halfway through setup.
A module that hadn't kept pace
Events functionality had grown in isolated, customer-specific increments rather than as one coherent product, one event type exists mainly because of a single client's calendar-sync issue, leaving fundamental gaps like the inability to edit a live event or offer a waitlist.
Solution direction
- Ran a structured discovery combining customer interviews, support ticket themes and a competitor and market audit across comms and event platforms.
- Reframed years of scattered feedback and feature requests into one set of functional requirements, organised around a single configurable event type.
- Worked with product and engineering to prioritise those requirements against real usage and support impact, so the roadmap reflects what matters most.
My contribution
As product designer on the initiative, I worked alongside product, engineering and architecture to translate years of accumulated feedback into a coherent, testable product direction, not just new screens, but a shared understanding across the team of why the module needed to change.
- Synthesised customer interviews and support themes into a prioritised set of functional and non-functional requirements.
- Ran a competitor and market audit across comms and event platforms to pressure-test the proposed direction.
- Explored a unified event creation flow that lets communicators add capability without switching event type.
- Worked with engineering and architecture to sequence delivery around the highest-impact, lowest-risk changes first.
Insights
What guided the design
01
One decision, not two
Communicators didn't want two event types with different strengths, they wanted a single experience that could flex from a quick town hall reminder to a capacity-limited training session.
02
Trust breaks when details can't change
The biggest source of frustration wasn't a missing feature, it was the inability to fix a mistake once an invite had gone out, so a typo or a changed link meant cancelling and restarting the whole event.
03
The calendar invite is the product
For many employees, the ICS file in their inbox is the entire experience of the event, so how it looks and behaves matters as much as the creation flow behind it.
Design decisions
What the design needed to make clear
Configure, don't choose
Replace the Simple/Advanced fork with a single flow where capability, tracking, capacity, registration, waitlists, is added through configuration, so no path is a dead end.
Make editing a live event safe
Let communicators update details such as descriptions, times and links after invites have gone out, and automatically resync attendees' calendars, rather than forcing a cancel-and-recreate.
Treat the ICS description like an email
Bring the same rich text, hyperlink and formatting controls communicators already use for emails into the calendar invite description.
Design for the moment of doubt
Clarify small but high-friction details, what a "Send" button actually does, how time zones resolve, whether a name can be reused, that were quietly generating a disproportionate number of support cases.
Process
A reusable design process
-
1
Discovery synthesis
Pulled together years of scattered customer feedback, support tickets and sales requests into a single, prioritised requirements set.
-
2
Competitor and market audit
Benchmarked the proposed direction against comms and event platforms, understanding where Poppulo needed to lead and where it just needed parity.
-
3
Requirements and prioritisation
Worked with product and engineering to frame each opportunity as a functional requirement, scored by priority and grouped into deliverable phases.
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4
Concept exploration
Explored a unified event creation flow, live-editing patterns and a richer calendar invite experience in Figma, ready to validate with customers.
Figma artefacts
Selected screens from the Figma file
View the full Figma file
Every screen and state behind this case study, including the ones that didn't make the page.
Starting a new event
Concept for the empty create-event flow, with RSVP close timing and visibility settings surfaced upfront.
Event list management
Concept for scanning event status, audience and schedule from a single list.
Filling in event details
Concept for a filled-in event, covering media, multiple ways to join, capacity and the event overview.
Branded email editor
Concept for editing the event invite with the same drag-and-drop content blocks used elsewhere in Poppulo, with a live preview alongside.
Design system
Accessible event module patterns
The design work spans form hierarchy, time zone and scheduling controls, rich text editing for calendar invites, empty and error states, and the list and calendar surfaces internal communicators rely on day to day.
Creation and review flow
The concepts show a single event creation journey that replaces the Simple/Advanced fork, with RSVP tracking, capacity and registration surfaced as optional steps rather than a fork in the road.
Management surfaces
List and calendar views let communicators manage live and past events, including editing a live event's details without cancelling and resending the invite.
Accessibility considerations
Inclusive product details that matter
- Every employee-facing event screen needs to meet WCAG AA, since events are one of the few Poppulo surfaces employees interact with directly, not just communicators.
- Calendar information should also be available in list form for screen-reader and keyboard users.
- Event status, draft, live or past, should use text as well as colour.
- Errors, such as a time zone or capacity setting that needs fixing, need clear, actionable messages, not just a red border.
Outcomes
Impact and product contribution
- Reframed years of scattered customer feedback and two divergent event types into a single, prioritised product direction.
- Defined a unified event creation model, with functional and non-functional requirements to guide engineering and architecture.
- Explored calendar-invite formatting, live-editing and RSVP concepts that directly informed the requirements handed to engineering.
- Ran a competitor and market audit that helped the team agree where to lead the market and where to simply close a gap.