The Money20/20 event app on a phone, showing the agenda in the brand's yellow, purple and blue colour blocks

Event apps — Money20/20 and Cannes Lions

Redesigning the event apps for Money20/20 and Cannes Lions — one platform, two brands, five regions — with a "back to basics" focus on real networking over feature bloat.

Role

Design direction

Research

Design (UI — Money20/20 2018 US)

Overview

Ascential operates across information services and events, and as part of the product design team, I oversaw the end-to-end digital experience for two flagship event brands — Cannes Lions and Money20/20 — from event discovery and ticket purchase through to the in-event experience and post-event follow-up. The event app itself sits at the centre of that journey: helping attendees navigate the event and network with the people who matter to them.

Photographs from the events — the Money20/20 expo hall, a keynote audience under blue lighting, delegates talking and meeting, the Cannes Lions Grand Prix stage, the CNN beach lounge, and the Cannes beach village

The Challenge

The brief was to build one platform that could serve two very different audiences across five regions, without flattening either brand into something generic. That meant finding the shared foundation between Cannes Lions and Money20/20, while still leaving room for each brand's distinct identity to come through.

When I took over the Money20/20 US app in 2018, it had drifted into feature bloat — lots of functionality, none of it working particularly well. So we stripped it back. We defined the edition's goal simply as "back to basics," and put all our focus on the app's core proposition: business networking.

Vision

We wanted the app to help decision-makers bridge digital and real-world conversations — a tool for unlocking discovery, not just displaying information.

For networking, that meant real matchmaking rather than a glorified group chat: "I don't want WhatsApp, I want an intelligent matchmaking tool." For content, it meant retiring the printed schedule in favour of an app that could actually surface what attendees might otherwise miss.

Laying the Foundation

Before any UI work, we mapped the experience properly — customer journey mapping, a full meeting-maker flow and process, a notification matrix defining every message type across the app, and structured user testing on the meeting-maker feature itself. This gave us a clear, validated foundation to design against rather than guessing at what attendees needed.

Nine slides from the Money20/20 Asia 2018 research playback: the research objectives, to understand how delegates use the app and to validate the networking features; attendee segmentation by gender, sector, location and job title; findings on logging into the app; networking feedback from the app, with a delegate quote about downloading it a week early and messaging immediately; the questions behind the networking analysis; key networking data points, where 32% of introductions led to a conversation and 39% of attendees made a connection; top messages by country across a world map; per-attendee headline metrics comparing Asia, USA, Europe and Cannes; and the recommended priorities for improving the overall event experience

Research, Built In

I led the research practice within the Events product team. Designers attend every event in person to run onsite research, focused primarily on app usability and the overall digital experience. After Money20/20 Asia 2018 — the first edition I attended — I produced an in-depth research report covering app performance and the wider event experience, which shaped the direction for later editions.

The Money20/20 app's home screen across four editions, each sharpening the visual identity — a red and navy "Come together and create the future of money" brought to you by HSBC, a black PayPal-sponsored "The Money Revolution", a black "Level-up: the future of money" scattered with coloured squares, and the Europe official event guide and networking tool sponsored by currency.com
  • Asia 2018
  • US 2018
  • Asia 2019
  • Europe 2019

Evolution

The app evolved visibly across four editions — Asia 2018, US 2018, Asia 2019, and Europe 2019 — each iteration sharpening the visual identity and refining the core networking and content features based on what we'd learned onsite.

App screens — the home screen's coloured tiles for pending meetings, agenda, speakers and sponsors, a prompt to update the app, the agenda by day, the speaker list and a speaker profile
Money20/20 US 2018 screens
App screens — the meeting maker flow, from a requested meeting and its message thread through a scheduled meeting card, the network recommendations, the My Money20/20 day view and the connections list at the PayPal Lounge
Money20/20 US 2018 meeting-maker flow
Money20/20 Asia 2019 app promo

Results — First Money20/20 app

  • Live 4 weeks before the event
  • 10,000+ downloads
  • 10,000+ meetings facilitated
  • 90% of meetings rated "very good"
  • 60,000 messages exchanged between delegates during the event
  • 40% increase in messages sent per user vs. the same event in 2017
  • Best performing app to date
Cannes Lions app screens — editorial content cards, an article view and a session detail page
Cannes Lions 2018 app screens
Cannes Lions app screens — schedule, today view and speaker detail
Cannes Lions 2018 app screens