Trade Show Nominations

Background

The Trade Shows team at a government contractor manages their participation in industry events, and ours held an annual nomination process to identify which primary trade shows would be pursued in the coming fiscal year. Their selection criteria prioritized trade shows that:

• aligned with the company's current strategic priorities and future growth accelerants

• brought in new business and critical company wins

• demonstrated multiple capabilities to customers

The Problem

The Trade Shows team had been using a basic Word document for years to gather annual trade show nominations. Employees from the customer-facing divisions would download this document from the company intranet, fill it out, and then email it back to the team, who would then manually copy the submitted data into an Excel spreadsheet for sorting and analysis. This method was tedious, time-consuming, and prone to errors.

Objective

Streamline the annual trade show nomination process by improving data collection and reducing manual entry.

I started by reviewing the existing Word form , and identified several issues:

• Redundancy: Some of the questions were similar and could be merged for clarity.

• No branching logic: Word-based forms can't take advantage of conditionals that could streamline the user experience.

• Inconsistent data input: Several questions used free-text answers instead of more appropriate form controls.

I presented my findings and proposed changes to the Trade Shows team, who agreed with my assessment and were eager to see how the improved nomination form would look and operate.

Our enterprise IT team had recently launched the Microsoft 365 Suite to the entire company, and MS Forms was the perfect app to use for the new nomination form. I created a proof of concept with the first few questions from the Word version that showcased the improvements gained by using MS Forms, and the Trade Shows team was extremely pleased with the results.

I transferred and optimized the remaining content from the Word version into MS Forms:

• Redundant questions were removed

• Conditional branching was added

• Proper input controls were used (date pickers, check boxes, and radio buttons)

• The overall form was divided into multiple sections to be more digestible

The Trade Shows team and I did a thorough review to ensure that all the questions had been captured correctly.

To ensure that the new form would work well for its target audience, I conducted a moderated usability test with five members of the marketing strategy team in different customer-facing divisions. The Trade Shows team had never spoken directly to the employees that submitted nominations, so I was curious about what kind of feedback we would receive.

We asked the test participants to submit a nomination with the new form, using data from an actual upcoming trade show. Fortunately, they were excellent at thinking out loud and provided valuable insights on how the form could be improved:

• Clarity of questions: Some of the original phrasing didn’t match how employees typically referred to trade show details

• Additional options: Participants identified check box options that were missing from certain questions

• Overlooked details: Supplemental text that guided users on how to answer a question was too subtle and easily missed

We used this information to refine and update the form before launching it at the start of the 2023 trade show season.

The new form dramatically reduced the manual effort required for both submitting and processing trade show nominations. What used to take days of back-and-forth emails and manual data entry was now streamlined into a simple, automated process. Additionally, the improved form experience for employees ensured that the data being submitted was more accurate and easier to work with.

After this improvement, the Trade Shows team reported a 65% reduction in time spent managing the nominations process, and was elated with the results: