Eventbrite: Creator Home
When creators landed on Eventbrite, they faced a frustrating guessing game. Brand new creators lacked a clear roadmap for setting up their accounts and events. Even after publishing for the first time, they often missed crucial steps like setting up payouts or discovering marketing tools like Boost. On top of that, creators had no easy way to check the real-time health of their events, which led to unnecessary support tickets and missed potential. Operating on a tight H2 2022 timeline, I led product design to bring everything into a single, consolidated workspace. By giving creators a clear view of their event health and surfacing the right actions at the exact right moment, we turned a fragmented experience into a guided path that drove meaningful growth.
My role: Product Design Lead
Context: Dual-Sided Marketplace Optimization
Duration: 1 Month (MVP) + Rapid Optimization Iterations
Impact: Boost Subscription Adoptions: +30% | First Paid Event Publishes: +18%
The Whole Picture
Creator Home was never just a standalone feature. It served as the central hub of a broader growth initiative that included two other critical tracks: the marketing landing page and the onboarding flow. While individual teams focused on executing those specific experiences, I provided the overarching design direction and cross-functional oversight. My role was to align all three workstreams into a single platform narrative so the entire journey felt intuitive from the moment a creator logged in.
Aligning Business Goals with Creator Needs
Heading into the second half of 2022, Eventbrite’s primary objective was to get more active creators hosting events on the platform. When we dug into the funnel data and user behavior analytics, we found two massive friction points blocking us:
Subscription Confusion: New creators couldn't figure out which paid tier actually matched the size of their event.
Hidden Value: Users who signed up for free trials were completely missing Boost (our suite of marketing tools) due to the tools being buried in a separate area of the site, outside their natural event-creation workflow.
To balance our growth targets with real user value, I put together a shared alignment document to get all stakeholders on the same page. I translated raw business requirements into clear human problem statements, focusing on how we could provide automated guidance and make it much easier to get an event live.
Final problem statements:
Discovery & Insights
Because our timeline was incredibly compressed, we didn’t have the luxury of running fresh, weeks-long user interview cycles. Instead, I established a rapid discovery phase by piecing together what we already knew. I dug into previous research reports, analyzed recent funnel metrics, and ran a comprehensive competitive/comparative audit to understand how modern creators expected to engage with modern platforms. I grouped these insights into three core design pillars with sub themes:
Kick-off Workshop
To get everyone moving in the same direction, I ran a cross-functional alignment workshop for our product, engineering, and marketing leadership and teams. Gathering everyone into one collaborative “room” (you know it was Figjam) early on was essential. It allowed us to voice technical constraints, hash out product requirements, and lock in a shared direction before we spent time exploring designs.
Designing for Two Very Different Users
Once we had alignment, I jumped into rapid wireframing and layout exploration. I anchored the design around a modular card layout because we needed a single interface that could gracefully serve two entirely different user profiles:
The Novice Creator: Needed clear instructions to guide them through successful initial milestones setup without making them feel overwhelmed.
The Power User: Wanted to skip the basics entirely and instantly see deep event metrics, live conversion data, and feature shortcuts.
Surfacing Resources
Beyond the core setup tools, we also needed to figure out where to put educational resources like how-to guides, platform tips, and creator spotlights. The trap here was turning the dashboard into a messy blog feed. We focused on treating this content as a supportive secondary layer by positioning it beneath the main action items so creators could easily find resources to scale their events without it cluttering their primary workspace.
Initial visual design explorations focused on optimizing the core layout of the task list itself. I ran through multiple layout directions and content densities to figure out how to surface setup milestones without giving users immediate fatigue. The goal was to establish a clear visual hierarchy that positioned Eventbrite as a smart partner rather than just an overwhelming, task-heavy chore list. I needed to find the sweet spot where a creator could see their immediate next steps clearly without feeling like the interface was crowding them.
Layout Densities
Midway through the project, our timeline was cut in half. Eventbrite’s biggest signup spike of the year happens in September, so missing that launch window wasn't an option. I collaborated directly with leadership and front-end engineering to pivot, scaling our complex card framework down into a streamlined, list-based MVP checklist. Stripping the layout down to this core checklist freed the engineering team to begin building the foundational architecture immediately, allowing us to work in tandem to meet the deadline. It wasn't the expansive dashboard we initially dreamed up, but it guaranteed we shipped a stable, high-value product right before our highest-traffic time of year.
Time Crunch
Accessibility
I refuse to treat accessibility like a rushed checklist item right before shipping. Eventbrite’s legacy brand palette didn't meet comprehensive AA compliance standards, so I partnered directly with our external brand and design systems team to overhaul our core visual assets. We audited and implemented high-contrast color variants, explicit focus states, accessible typography scales, and robust screen-reader support to make sure we were building a truly inclusive workspace.
Launched MVP Designs
Engineering Handoff
To eliminate any "lost in translation" friction between design and code, we brought our engineers into the process on day one. We reviewed component structure, layout logic, and edge cases together in parallel with my visual design refinement. Because of this continuous communication, the final handoff didn't involve chaotic, reactive explanation sessions. Instead, we delivered highly annotated Figma specs that led to an incredibly efficient build cycle.
Huh. Well, that Didn’t Work.
We watched the live data roll in post-launch, waiting for the big win. Instead? Total radio silence. Turns out, that in an attempt to satisfy every single internal stakeholder’s request for placement in the checklist had resulted in a crammed the checklist with far too many tasks. (To be honest, I had warned about this trap early on and spent weeks playing defense. The version we shipped was actually a reduced list compared to what stakeholders originally wanted, but clearly we still needed to cut deeper.) What we had built a noisy, cluttered wall of text, and creators did exactly what any of us would do. They completely ignored it. It was a bit of a bruise, but clearly identified where needed to take action.
I initiated a rapid optimization phase to salvage the feature and turn the metrics around. First, I took a chainsaw to the list, stripping it down to the three non-negotiable actions that actually mattered: creating the event, setting up the profile, and setting up payouts. Then, I designed an A/B test to see how best to present these tasks to users, pitting a simple focused checklist against a more visual set of dashboard tiles. The actions were the same, but the layout presentation changed everything. The checklist won by a landslide. Getting rid of the visual clutter and using a straightforward, 3 step checklist wiped out the friction and got creators moving again.
a/b testing
The Final Design
The updated layout successfully combined the winning streamlined checklist with a few personalized modules for later. By cutting out the stakeholder noise and focusing purely on what users actually needed to do, the new design unlocked the exact momentum the business was looking for. It proved that sometimes the best user guidance is just getting out of the way and keeping things incredibly simple.
Quantifiable Impact
Upon releasing the slimmer checklist we began to see the results we were looking for. Hurray! In the end, we saw…
Boost Subscription Adoptions: +30%
First Paid Event Publication Velocity: +18%
Team Velocity: Replaced reactive design handoffs with an engineering-forward, system-driven workflow.