How INBOUND Followed Data Driven Design Approach

Marketers are well-versed with data driven approach. Their campaigns, whether organic or paid, are based on client data and the data from the last campaign they organized.

We don't see the data-driven approach in designing quite often. The recent one we saw was at INBOUND22. INBOUND is HubSpot's yearly conference where marketers, developers, RevOps, DevOps, thought leaders, and people from all walks of life join this 3-day ride where they network, share their innovative ideas future of the tech industry, and enjoy the company of the like-minded attendees.

INBOUND21 was a complete digital event due to the COVID outbreak.

INBOUND22 was digital as well as physical. So, managing the event on both physical grounds and digital grounds was a bit challenging. 

How INBOUND Website Worked – For Those Who Didn't Attend the Event

Brief context before the major unveil – Once the INBOUND attendees log in to the website to attend the event. They would have access to the following options.

Complete calendar details about the upcoming speaker events, chat sessions, and meetups.

• List of speakers and their profile brief
• Complete list of sponsors
• Attendees and their profile brief

Attendees would attend their favorite meetups, speaker events, and chat sessions. They could also organize chat sessions on the topics they want to share information on.

It was a well-organized and interactive website.

Coming Back to Data Driven Design Approach

Drea Hudson, Manager, New Media Growth and Distribution, HubSpot, Dax Miller, Head of Product, A8 Labs, and Em Wingrove, VP of Client Services, Aptitude 8, shared some of the instances of how they pulled the designing of INBOUND website, the digital experience for the attendees using the data-driven approach.

As you know, HubSpot is a fully integrated CRM that gives a great experience to its users. It is a powerful database that constantly maintains a good relationship between the frontend and backend.

HubSpot manages all of that smoothly using HubDB. HubDB is a relational database that is super flexible, leverages GraphQL, and quickly updates large datasets.

For INBOUND, there were large datasets involved, such as

• The relationship between speakers
• Time slots, start time and date, attendees,
• Their access is based on their past
• Chat sessions, virtual meetups, sponsors' data
• The time that the user entered the event
• The time when the user registered
• The time they bought the ticket
• All the sessions they attended vs. the ones they had quit
• Number of Feedback
• How much feedback they left

All these data points were gathered from several different sources, from both digital and physical events. And all of these were interrelated.

HubDB allowed the developers to create tables with all this data and provide a different experience for each user viewing the website. The experience was based on the user's previous INBOUND activity and the last session or meetup they attended. And this was constantly changing because something was going on one after the other in the event. 

HubDB also works well with third-party tools. For INBOUND22, AirTable was used to fetch data about the sessions, speakers, attendees, and sponsors in the table form. Then Airtable data would go to HubDB for further data processing.

Similarly, Bizzabo was integrated with the platform for ticket selling and improving the ticketing sales experience. HubDB fetched that data from Bizzabo and updated it in the database.

HubDB's flexibility in leveraging outside databases is impeccable.

Design Driven by Data

As discussed by Drea Hudson, Manager, New Media Growth and Distribution, HubSpot, Dax Miller, Head of Product, A8 Labs, and Em Wingrove, VP of Client Services, Aptitude 8, the design of the complete INBOUND website was driven by data.

The user experience relied on what data they gave to the platform.

• Which sessions did they check out?
• Which speaker sessions they attended?
• Which chat groups they created or attended?
• To whom they messaged.
• Which sponsor tile they clicked?

All this data was structured so well and aesthetically that it helped them design the website and give each user a unique, relevant, and customized experience. It was personalized for every individual.

For the backend team, INBOUND was a data-heavy project. People were attending the event in person in Boston, and people were attending the event from the comfort of their homes.

"Data, as an asset, was used as the base for the design."

Inbound Wrapped

'Inbound Wrapped' was a post-event compilation of the activities of each user who attended the event. They would receive a mail and a unique link where they could see the total number of sessions they attended, the conversations they were part of, the people they reached out to, and so on.

INBOUND Wrapped Screenshots
 

 
The idea behind 'Inbound Wrapped' was to give something back to the user once the event was over. This data also helped the developers design future events. It's a building block for the next year's INBOUND installment.