Customer Experience + Brand

Role: Exhibitor, experience evaluator, and author of a post-conference touchpoint audit
Organization: ICF International (large Federal contract)

A conference as an experience to design, not a booth to staff

Attending a conference as a first-time exhibitor is something most people treat as a to-do list. Show up, staff the booth, hand out materials, go home. I treated it as a customer experience worth designing, every point where an attendee meets the brand, from the walk-up to the follow-through.

The friction I spotted: everything was blue

I had designed swag and handouts for Information Gateway conferences before, but I had never seen the exhibit in person. Walking up to the booth for the first time, something was immediately clear: everything was blue. The tablecloth, the banners, the swag, the bags — all the same shade, all competing with each other, none of it popping. The brand had accent colors that existed for exactly this purpose and none of them were anywhere in sight.

A fix, mocked up on site

While I was there, I took photos of the setup and created mockups showing what the table could look like with the brand's aqua blue and bright yellow introduced as accent colors. The goal wasn't a full redesign — it was showing how small, intentional changes to color distribution could make the whole exhibit feel more cohesive and visually alive.

A four-day touchpoint audit

Beyond the visual, I treated the four days as fieldwork. I tracked 113 attendee engagements as voice-of-customer data, documenting conversations, questions, and content gaps; monitored publication distribution across seven titles; and evaluated every touchpoint along the attendee journey, from the QR landing page experience to swag selection to the exhibitor support materials. I also piloted AI tools to test a smarter approach to publication selection, generating audience-matched recommendations from the conference program, attendee profile, and our publication inventory.

From observation to a reusable framework

The audit I produced covered eight areas, each pairing direct observation and attendee feedback with specific, actionable recommendations:

• Conference audience alignment

• Exhibitor support materials

• Booth engagement strategies

• QR landing page experience

• Swag cohesion and recommendations

• Physical reminder materials

• Publication selection

• Content and collaboration gaps

The outcome: adopted, and acted on

The response was immediate. Colleagues called it “such a great and helpful update” and noted that the structure of the evaluation itself could become a standardized feedback framework for future conferences — turning a one-time audit into a repeatable way to measure the exhibit experience. The outreach team commissioned new swag designs based directly on the mockups. The new pieces use the aqua blue and bright yellow accent colors, and the response to the designs said everything: "I'm not surprised because everything you've ever designed has always been incredible, but these designs are blowing me away. I am obsessed with what you've done."

Why this is the work I do

This is what I find most energizing: walking into an experience, seeing where it works and where it strains, and coming back with practical changes that make the next one better.