Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre

A track record of design, experimentation and innovation success for over 10 years.

Reimagining the event experience

The Brief

Most companies had to reconfigure their products or services after the pandemic. The event industry, in particular, had to be very flexible to survive under these conditions, adapting to online events and then, when restrictions eased, going back in person. Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) seized this opportunity to find new ways to deliver value to its customers.

MCEC is the largest convention and exhibition venue in Australia. It hosts over 1,000 events yearly through its multiple innovative spaces. It contributes considerably to the economic development of the state of Victoria.

Our initial brief from MCEC involved two opportunities. Firstly, to find new value streams and potential business model opportunities linked to their internal strategy, and secondly to identify opportunities to improve their digital offering.

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The Creative Process

To understand how the ecosystem of MCEC functions, we reviewed and analysed existing journey maps and personas, providing enough information to identify gaps and opportunities in the service offering. Applying ethnographic research, we gained insights into the various trends around event planning, how competitors adapted to this change, and how virtual and hybrid events sit within the context of MCEC.

The initial hypotheses were tested through interviews with different customer segments. This part of the process was crucial to understanding event planners’ primary needs and pain points in our current context. After this phase, we delivered a detailed insights report identifying six vital areas of opportunity for MCEC to consider.

Working closely with the innovation leads at MCEC, we determined three key opportunity areas from the research that would inform the direction of our co-design approach. This included transformative business model opportunities to sustain and improve the current offer by digitising the business, making it easy for customers to access their service. A final playbook was developed containing a summary of the key insights to understand the context of the event planning industry, specifically for the MCEC landscape.

The Result

Six UX prototypes were designed and validated with MCEC customers addressing the main pain points discovered in the research. 4 of these were validated the point of of these of concepts were taken into development by the digital and sales teams.