Case Study

Spark Conference is an annual gathering for creative professionals, entrepreneurs, and community builders — a space designed to ignite new ideas through talks, workshops, and curated networking. When I came on board the web team, the conference was growing fast but its digital presence hadn’t kept pace.

The Challenge

The specific challenge: redesign the conference website to drive a 20% increase in early-bird ticket registrations within the first 30 days of the new site going live before the next event cycle. The redesign also needed to accommodate a speaker lineup of 40+ names, a multi-track schedule, and a sponsor tier display — all without creating a bloated, slow experience.

My Role

As Web Designer, I led the redesign from discovery to final handoff. I ran a UX audit of the previous site, mapped the registration funnel, and designed a system of page templates covering the homepage, speaker profiles, schedule, and sponsorship pages. I delivered full desktop and mobile designs and worked with developers to QA the final implementation.

What We Achieved

  • Early-bird ticket registrations increased 27% in the first 30 days post-launch, exceeding the 20% target
  • Speaker profile page redesign reduced average “who is speaking” support emails by ~35%
  • Designed schedule UI that handled 40+ sessions across 3 tracks with zero layout breakpoints on mobile
  • Lighthouse performance score improved from 54 → 89 on mobile after design-led asset optimization
  • Full design system — components, color tokens, type scale — delivered in 4 weeks, enabling rapid content updates by the events team through launch week
Process

How We Got There

UX Audit

Analyzed the existing site's registration funnel drop-off, identified friction points through heuristic evaluation, and benchmarked against leading conference sites.

Information Architecture

Restructured the site map to prioritize registration, speakers, and schedule — the three most user-sought destinations — reducing average clicks-to-register from 4 to 2.

Design System

Built a full component library in Figma — buttons, cards, schedule rows, speaker tiles, sponsor tiers — with a shared color token and type scale within 4 weeks.

Page Design

Designed all key page templates at desktop and mobile fidelity: homepage, speaker profiles, multi-track schedule, and sponsorship tier display.

Handoff & QA

Delivered annotated Figma specs to the dev team, ran two QA passes on the Webflow implementation, and monitored registration analytics for 30 days post-launch.

Reflection

Lessons Learned

Registration funnels are conversion funnels — design them the same way

Every page of a conference site is either moving someone toward buying a ticket or not. Treating the redesign as a conversion problem, not a visual refresh, is what drove the 27% registration lift.

A design system built for content editors is more valuable than one built for designers

The 4-week design system's real test was whether the events team could update it solo during launch week. They could — that's the measure of success, not the token documentation.

Good information architecture reduces support volume

The 35% drop in speaker support emails came entirely from better IA on the speaker profile pages — not redesigned visuals. Finding the right answer is a design problem.