Product UX case study
Event Admin Pro
Rescuing a decade-old event-registration admin platform from its own complexity — and giving clients a modern, mobile-friendly tool they could actually use themselves.
- Role
- Product UX/UI, research
- Company
- Convention Data Services
- Tools
- Adobe XD, PHP, Bootstrap 4
- Type
- Internal product redesign
The prototype
The interactive Adobe XD prototype of the redesigned platform:
The problem
Event Admin was one of the first tools I was trained on at Convention Data Services — the place clients went to edit emails, images, and event information for their registration pages. The trouble was a front end that hadn't been touched in nearly a decade, a confusing UI, and a *second* back-end tool with a similar dated interface handling the database. Clients leaned so heavily on registration managers to make simple edits that the platform defeated its own purpose, and onboarding ate up hours of training.
Goals
Three clear needs drove the redesign: a modern UI with genuinely improved navigation, a modular front-end framework to replace the aging codebase, and a look that matched the color and typography of CDS's other client-facing products. It also had to work on mobile and tablet — the old dashboard simply didn't.
Research & architecture
I ran several rounds of meetings with developers and stakeholders to align on both the technical foundation — PHP as the base with a much-needed Bootstrap 4 upgrade — and what functionality to add, remove, or consolidate. Because multiple iterations of Event Admin existed in the wild (including a separate Web Developer Tools app), I created an Architecture Guidelines + Legend that mapped and condensed the repetitive functionality across them and re-grouped the navigation. That single artifact became the team's source of truth — it sped up decisions, cut the number of meetings roughly in half, and kept a record of what had already been settled so we only revisited what truly needed cross-department approval.
The result
We refreshed the UI, rebuilt the code to modern standards, and streamlined the navigation. New capabilities included a Client Dashboard with an at-a-glance summary of event info, the team running it, and a frequently used settings tab — plus a Global Uploader merged in from the Web Developer Tools app to create a single hub for asset uploads. The interface finally worked on mobile and tablet, and the product was visually synchronized with the rest of the CDS suite.
Before — the legacy platform
The dated, decade-old UI we set out to modernize. Click to enlarge.
After — the redesigned platform
Highlights of the rebuilt Event Admin Pro. Click to enlarge.
½
Fewer decision-making meetings via the architecture legend
10 yrs
Of legacy UI debt modernized
1 hub
Multiple tools consolidated into one platform