Eventbrite: Creator Experience
Creators were getting lost in Eventbrite’s legacy interface. To fix this, I redesigned the platform's core layout and navigation from scratch. By mapping the new architecture to actual creator goals, we eliminated the confusion, highlighted their most important day-to-day tasks, and made it natural to find marketing tools like Boost.
Role: UX Design Lead
Scope: Product Strategy, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, User Testing
Timeline: 3 months
Impact: 3+ Workspace visits +30% | Workspace pageviews +161%
how did we Get Here?
Before we dug into the designs, it was critical to understand how the current structure of the Creator experience had been determined and the thinking behind it in order to avoid the same pitfalls. Initial research (internal interviews, scrubbing early documentation) revealed that the existing Creator experience was originally designed around the assumption that the event itself was the Creator’s primary focus. As a result, the entire workflow was structured to begin with navigating to an event before completing any related tasks.
Auditing the Current Experience
The existing design lacked an orientation moment—Creators were immediately dropped into a list of their events without context or guidance, which many found disorienting and confusing. Compounding this, the top navigation was structured in a way that didn’t align with users’ mental models, making it difficult to locate key actions. Users reported having to rely on guesswork, memory, or luck to find what they needed—particularly for features they used less frequently—due to poor scanability and unclear navigation paths.
The Super Creator
The research team conducted in-depth interviews to better understand the diverse range of Creators using Eventbrite. While several personas emerged from this work, our primary focus centered on one key user type: the Super Creator. These were typically small operations where a single individual managed multiple roles within their organization. Their events often followed a “programmatic” structure—either recurring (like a weekly mixer) or sequential (such as a multi-part class). This behavior highlighted gaps in the existing system and underscored the need for a reimagined framework tailored specifically to their workflows.
Understanding How Creators Work
I evolved the concept of “Jobs to Be Done” into a more actionable framework for product thinking. We recognized that creators were hiring Eventbrite to help them accomplish distinct types of work at different phases of their event process—such as building, marketing, managing, and analyzing. I helped define these “jobs” as hubs of activity rather than steps in a fixed sequence. This distinction was especially critical for our Super Creator persona—users who run multiple recurring or sequential events and often batch their work. My goal was to challenge the product’s existing mental model and explore new interaction patterns that allowed for more fluid, creator-centric workflows.
The Event Lifecycle
While we had a high-level understanding of what creators needed throughout the lifecycle of their events, we knew it lacked the depth required to truly design for their realities. Returning to our research and the Super Creator’s core Jobs to Be Done, we zoomed in on the event lifecycle itself—breaking it down into more granular sub-phases. Each of these sub-phases revealed unique needs, motivations, and pain points from the Creator’s perspective. This more nuanced view gave us a strong foundation to rethink the product’s architecture and interaction design, ultimately enabling us to better support creators at every step of their journey.
Audit of Current Architecture
As we examined the existing site architecture, we uncovered a kind of lightweight chaos. While the event creation wizard followed a relatively logical sequence, many of the supporting actions were hidden within dense, overwhelming pages—making it difficult for users to locate what they needed.
At a higher level, the overall site structure was grouped too broadly, forcing users to rely on guesswork to determine where a specific action or piece of information might live. This lack of clarity created unnecessary friction and hindered efficiency across the experience.
Through the research and testing we had conducted, we found that there were 6 primary nav items that would accommodate and prioritize appropriately the functionality Eventbrite users wanted. These were: Events, Orders, Reports, Marketing, Finance, Settings. With this in mind, we began to focus on the layout and behavior of the primary navigation.
Nav Explorations
Left Side Best Side
We opted for a left-hand navigation with icons to indicate each workspace. Given the number of top-level nav items Eventbrite had (and really, this was unavoidable, slimming it down added more confusion rather than reducing it). Placing the nav on the left side provided an omni-present and unintrusive navigation that was within the user’s sight-line and easily scannable. Main navigation options were organized by most-to-least utilized and given labels to capture, broadly, what actions it contained. We took this and began to iterate on designs.
Assessing Workspace Needs
On the Creator side of the experience, internal teams were organized by function—such as Marketing, Finance, and so on. In our redesigned layout, these functional groups were reflected as distinct workspaces within the primary navigation. Once the high-level navigation structure was established, our next challenge was defining the layout and design system for each workspace. We needed to create a flexible framework that could support the unique content and functionality requirements of each team. To inform this, we conducted a thorough audit of existing site areas and partnered with internal stakeholders to understand their specific goals, workflows, and constraints.
Layout Design
We began iterating on layout concepts (although the earliest explorations are sadly lost to time—they did happen!). The initial approach introduced a secondary level of navigation within each primary section. However, once we stress-tested the structure using real content from across the platform, it became clear that a second tier wouldn’t provide enough flexibility—many sections were simply too dense. To address this, we introduced a third level of navigation positioned alongside the main content on the left. This tertiary layer offered the adaptability needed to support both content-heavy areas and more lightweight, single-page sections. After securing buy-in from relevant teams, we aligned on this structure and moved forward with implementation.
Bringing in Visual Design
With confidence in the new layout and strong cross-functional buy-in, we turned our focus to visual design and interaction details. One of our key goals was to bring more expressiveness and visual appeal to the Creator side of the experience—which had historically prioritized utility over aesthetics. This had created a noticeable visual imbalance between the Attendee-facing experience and the tools used by Creators. We set out to shift that, introducing more polish, clarity, and visual punch to the event creation and management experience—without compromising functionality.
Documentation and Execution
After final rounds of stakeholder buy-in and user testing, we were confident in our layout and new architecture. With that, we committed our designs to documentation. Engineering had been involved throughout the project to ensure we were working within technical constraints, but a final presentation was given to demonstrate the intended look and functionality of the new layout and architecture. QA happened once-a-week with intermittent design questions ad-hoc as they came up.
Final Designs
The Impact
