Interaction & visual
Lanyrd
'Silicon Roundabout's' event startup
Context
After ten years at the BBC, I not only had a wealth of design challenges and experiences under my belt, I started to recognize, and be exhausted by, the inherent bureaucracy that a corporation the size of the BBC was increasingly suffering from. Merely getting buy-in for a feature required a large war-room and an equally large volume of work to fill it. Add to this the allure of the burgeoning startup scene in London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’, I wanted to try something new and, again, challenge myself by getting out of my comfort zone.
In 2012, I joined as sole designer in the five-person startup, Lanyrd, the social event platform, funded through Y-Combinator. I was thrown into the deep-end of the fast-paced world of constant ideation, research, shipping and iteration—the scrappy startup story. When I joined the team, they were already getting traction with their social tool for event organizers, helping them create and run their events, and enabling event seekers to find, attend and track events and speakers.
Pattern portfolio
Responsibility
Responsible for creating cohesion across a disparate product experience, initially designed by one of the founders of the company, I worked to create a cohesive design system and product experiences that catered to the needs of event creators and conference attendees alike.
Working through many iterations of the overall offering—from the event creation experience to multi-track conference solutions in a native app, all the way to designing the SKUs for the pro accounts that saw monetization opportunities and generating a profit.
By designing delightful experiences, for both responsive web and mobile native, we were able to help thousands of events run smoothly, resulting in our ‘up-start’ company being sought after by many big name suitors, ultimately resulting in acquisition by Eventbrite in 2013.
