Product Critique #1 — Hopin

PRODUCT: Hopin

Background

Amanda and I (Michelle) partnered up to do Product Critiques to continue sharpening our product sense! This is our first, joint product critique. Check out each of our takes, especially if you are a product management neophyte!

Approach

For these exercises, we go through the entire product in detail from both business and user perspectives, recording our likes / loves, suggested improvements, and unique new feature ideas, ensuring that all of these are at the intersection of customer and business value.

What is the product? “Whether you’re bringing your physical event online or building from the ground up, Hopin helps you create exciting events for your global audience. No travel required.”

Why did we choose this product? As the world has gone virtual and global on a level never known before, a lot of applications are stepping up to recreate situations we are used to doing in person. Hopin has stepped up in a major way to recreate a conference environment with its “Stage,” “Networking,” and “Expo” categories.

How did we do it? We created an organizer profile to create an event, then logged into the event as attendees!

Amanda’s take

I liked / loved…

We were able to create an experiment environment to create a conference of our own as an organizer. Right away, login and onboarding was easy and straightforward! The menu of items to create a conference was detailed, with explanations provided via a hover feature when necessary.

As a conference attendee, seeing all the categories laid out in an easily read vertical format to the left of the screen (mimicking a menu) was a comforting design. Seeing the task bar at the top center of the screen helped keep a count on how much time was left to take full advantage of the event.

I would suggest improving…

While the onboarding for companies/organizers initially seemed like a breeze, it quickly became complicated and seemed to rely on the person creating the event having technical literacy (ex.: video resolution choices). While this may not seem like a big deal for the technically sound, there are many who may not understand and may get frustrated in attempting use.

As we progressed through creating an event, some features seemed to be laid out in a confusing area, sometimes pointing to another section before completing the current section.

It may be a positive exercise in action to create a video tutorial on how to maneuver through the sections for those users who are first time users, technical or not.

As an attendee it wasn’t explained how the “connect” feature works — most people either seem to find out via trial and error or are told from another user who had previously used the platform. This is an issue for new users and huge events. Having a “first time” video tutorial may be immensely helpful, ideally once an attendee has signed up for an event — it could be part of the welcome/confirmation email.

One thing to watch out for for all users: bandwidth! These days everyone is utilizing home wi-fi for all their devices. I personally have experienced being in a dark hole where the web page is frozen, the laptop is groaning, and the only thing to do is wait. A reminder in the beginning for users to make sure they are monitoring connected devices.

I think a unique new feature idea would be…

For organizers, I think a great feature would be a “help buddy” that guides this user through the journey to create and host an event. As mentioned above, the journey seemed to get more convoluted and confusing with progression. A help buddy for the user to reference and get expanded explanations from would greatly aid in both keeping users and retaining them.

For event attendees, I think a great feature would be to allow people to use virtual backgrounds when they are participating in the networking sessions. Zoom has set the standard here, and many related applications are trying to catch up. Hopin can further pull away from the pack by deploying this new feature — they could either create branded banners (i.e. the name of the event and sponsors), sort of like a step & repeat, or they could partner with sponsors of the event to create background stickers.

I also think a great feature idea would be incorporating live Closed Captioning to ensure differently abled potential attendees can participate. We’ve seen the live closed captioning app feature on other platforms, such as Instagram, that also have a live feature that users are not only aware of but use on a daily basis. With machine learning, these closed captioning apps can only hope to improve and would be a worth investment for an application that relies on live, virtual attendance.

Overall I think that…

As an attendee, using Hopin is relatively easy and mostly straightforward. It seems to be the consensus of many that this platform is the most accurate in mimicking live & in person events with the functionalities available for event attendees on the platform.

As a company/organizer, once you are able to figure out all the moving parts for creating the conference (which Hopin lays out in meticulous detail), it seems that your journey from there should be seamless! However there are many customer reviews that mention “sign up” and “slow customer service” issues. In addition, as mentioned before, we ourselves had issues figuring out some mandatory inputs. However being people who like to poke around, we eventually found the right order of things and were able to set up an event. Essentially, creating an event (like most things) takes practice just to get right.

Hopin has the potential to be the top application that sets the standard for conference applications going forward.

Michelle’s take

I liked / loved…

Organizer

• Reports page: As we used the Free plan, we did not get to try out the Movement Logs Report, but this could be very valuable data for understanding how attendees are moving through an event.
• Event time: I love the “Time Left” feature. It encourages keeping events on-track and efficient. On the other end, being able to extend the event time helps promote engagement in the platform.
• Expo area: This area gives the hosting company and vendors time back to focus on speaking about more salient points during the event while attendees can learn more about these companies separately.
• Forms: There are examples of what is supposed to go in each field. Although it may seem unremarkable, this contributed to a positive, helpful, and efficient onboarding and event creation experience.

Attendee

• Event time: Again, I love the “Time Left” feature. Seeing how much time is left in the event helps to gauge where you are in the sense that you can lose your sense of time when interacting with virtual settings.
• Networking area: The option to extend the networking time with an individual if the conversation / connection is going really well. Amanda actually mentioned that she used this time-extension feature. At the same time, neither I nor those with whom I was networking knew about this time-extension feature so it could be more pronounced in the platform, especially if the organizer wants to encourage more engagement during the event. Love this feature but wish I could have actually used it.
• Connections page: Although I had no connections due a suggested improvement I mention below (Onboarding process / Profile page), I saw Amanda’s Connections page. I love the idea that there is one place to see all of the people you connected with at an event versus having to remember or record their information elsewhere. Where, how, and when you met people are all there.

I would suggest improving…

Organizer

• New event page: The Start and End form fields have dates and times in a format — 28 September 17:00 — to which not all users, in the United States for example, are accustomed.
• Polls: “Polls are visible across the entire event; they are not specific to particular Sessions or Expo booths.” I imagine that organizers would also like to create polls for specific parts of their event only.

Attendee

• Onboarding process / Profile page: I did not know that in order to connect with someone on Hopin that you have to have your LinkedIn URL in your profile. At my first event on the Hopin platform, many people tried to connect with me, but none went through because my LinkedIn URL was not in my profile. In another social connection platform, Icebreaker, when I meet someone, the platform automatically adds them to my Matches page. No LinkedIn URL needed.
• Event time: In PINE Tool, another online event platform, in the side navigation, it constantly displays not only the event’s time but also my time. This platform also asked me in which format I would like both dates and times displayed — 28 September or September 28, for example. This contributed to a positive user experience.

I think a unique new feature idea would be…

Organizer

• Event creation packages for different types of events: In the process of creating an event, it was not clear all the areas I needed to fill out to successfully create the event. In other words, when do I reach the point where I have completed all of the necessary fields to launch my event? On Hopin’s landing page, they mention that organizers can customize their Hopin events to fit their requirements “whether it’s a 50-person recruiting event, a 500-person all-hands meeting, or a 50,000-person annual conference.“ If there were guided workflows for these different event types — for example, a “Recruiting Event” guided workflow package — the event creation process could be faster, clearer, and more focused.
• Integration with popular CRMs + Personalization for Register Interest feature: When attendees express interest in a vendor, both the data that is collected from attendees and where that data is stored is decided by the platform. If these vendors already have a CRM in which they store this type of information, the lack of this feature adds another step in their workflow in adding this new information into their CRM.

Attendee

• Profile page + Networking area: An integration with LinkedIn to 1) auto-fill a user’s profile and 2) automatically connect on LinkedIn when one user attempts to connect with another to make connecting with others seamless.

Some other things I observed…

UX design patterns: Having attended TechThinkers’ Emotional Design virtual event, I also learned how to observe UX design patterns more closely.

Organizer

• Stage creation page: I noticed that the Stream provider form field dropdown options are not in alphabetical order, which may or may not be consciously done. The order appears to start with the option that the platform would prefer the user to choose or the most popular option. The options also reveal the other companies that the platform has partnered with or integrated with to provide streaming services. These are both decisions that organizers may not be consciously aware of but that contribute to their decision making.

• Expo creation page: In some areas of the platform, the help text is informative. In other areas, such as for this form field, the help text is not as informative as it could be. The organizer does not know what the sizes mean exactly as the booth sizes are not given numerically — what is Medium? — while the help text steers the user to choose Large. There could be more and objective information to help the organizer make the optimal decision for their event.

Attendee

• Platform side navigation: This design practice is familiar to me, but I wanted to make a note of the choice to include icons and copy. For example, the difference between the “Sessions” and “Network” icons may not be obvious without the copy.

Overall I think that…

Organizer: The platform has robust tools that helps organizers customize an event to their unique specifications, but these tools could appear even more powerful to organizers if there was more structure and guidance for their use.

Attendee: The first time I used this platform back in May, I loved it. As Amanda said, “It seems to be the consensus of many that this platform is the most accurate in mimicking live & in person events with the functionalities available.” The Networking area is my favorite — speed networking where you get to speak to randomly selected individuals from the event for three minutes with the option to connect, encouraging speaking to people you may not have otherwise spoken to and keeping the conversation short and sweet (if it’s only three minutes, of course).

What do you think?

What do you think about our approach?

Do you have any comments or feedback on our analyses?

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