Google Xi Days | Audience Advocacy
Google Experience Institute (Xi) launched its first event, Xi Days, to reimagine the future of events and experiences. The initiative focused on personalization, inclusion, and innovative design to meet evolving audience needs. By serving as audience advocates, the Storycraft Lab team ensured the event reflected participant preferences and empowered them to engage meaningfully.
Role: Creative Director, Project Lead, Audience Advocate, Experience Strategist, and Content Developer.
Deliverables: Audience Advocacy Strategy, Personalized Engagement Framework, Experience Profiles™ Integration with Event Design.
Key Components:
Empathy & Research: Conducted interviews with industry professionals and audience members to uncover evolving needs, preferences, and trends.
Personalization & Dialogue: Used insights from interviews to create a personalized engagement framework that allowed attendees to shape their experience.
Experience Profiles™ Integration: Tailored the original Experience Profiles™ to align with the event's goals, reducing them from six to four profiles—Explore, Excavate, Build Bridge, and Innovate—to reflect attendee journeys.
Engagement Strategy: Developed pre-event pathways, including quizzes, onboarding experiences, and choice architecture, to guide attendees through tailored experiences.
Process:
Xi Days placed a strong emphasis on audience advocacy, with a pre-event journey that included in-depth research and focus groups to shape the event's design. Attendees engaged with Experience Profiles™ through three distinct paths: taking a quiz, self-identifying, or learning about the methodology behind the profiles. This created a transparent and inclusive onboarding experience.
One pivotal outcome was the alignment of the profiles with event choice architecture, ensuring that all design and engagement strategies reflected participant preferences and needs. This approach emphasized personalization as a pathway to inclusion, enhancing the overall attendee experience.
Xi Days is…..
Audience Research & Personalization
Crafting Inclusive Experiences through Insight-Driven Design and Engagement
Pre-Event Experiential Journey
The journey to crafting Xi Days involved in-depth pre-event research. By conducting a series of interviews with industry professionals and audience members, we gathered crucial insights into evolving audience needs and preferences before attending an event.
Onboarding Experience: Pathways to Discovering Your Experience Profile™
In our quest to enhance audience engagement at Xi Days, we focused on how to onboard participants effectively using the Experience Profiles™. We designed three distinct paths:
Path One: Take the quiz to discover your match.
Path Two: Self-identify by reading about the profiles and deciding for yourself.
Path Three: Learn about the methodology behind the Experience Profiles™ before taking the quiz or self-identifying.
Our goal was to ensure attendees felt confident, comfortable, and curious about the experience. We emphasized transparency, flexibility, and consistent invitations to participate. By explaining the importance of their input, offering multiple ways to engage, and regularly inviting participation, we created an inclusive and welcoming onboarding process.
Audience Focus Groups
We conducted a series of 4 Audience Focus Group sessions to help us refine the creative approach and content for Xi Days. Each session was dedicated to a different piece of the event. We included a series of prompting questions, ideas, and visuals to gain feedback from our participants. Because Xi Days was intended to be highly experimental — tailored to emerging needs, trends, and sentiments — we invited every prospective participant to co-create with us in this collaborative process.
Creative Strategy, Design, Implementation
Customizing the Experience Profiles™ for Xi Days
Through focus groups, conversations, and understanding the Xi community, we tailored the original Experience Profiles to fit Xi Days and align with the manifesto. This included reducing them from 6 profiles to 4, to accommodate for the more intimate audience size, renaming the profiles, and aligning their preferences with Explore, Excavate, and Bridge Build.
This sample schematic diagram provides an at-a-glance overview of how each Experience Profile preference-set is accounted for throughout the event using a color coding system. It serves as a visual reference on whether the design and engagement strategies are accommodating a balance of preferences and needs across the 3 days for all attendees.
Attendee
Trail Guide
Custom recommendation per Experience Profile™
Onsite Docents
The Audience Advocates