2020 has been a deeply impactful and difficult year. So much of it has affected our lives and experiences. We can’t socialize how we used to, can’t freely travel, must practice extreme caution when visiting with older relatives (or really anyone in general), and can’t attend any indoor (in-person) event for the time being.
From an events perspective, both event organizers and attendees have learned how to navigate ways of connecting with our fellow humans in ways that still strengthen our bonds and bring us closer together while we remain physically distant.
Clear, unequivocal communication remains an important tool — perhaps now more than ever. Subtlety or complexity may mean that others may misinterpret (or just miss) what we mean to say, or even that we are saying anything at all.
These challenges presented Splash Creative with a unique research opportunity to evaluate how Splash users are successfully bringing people together virtually. We assessed the highest-performing event websites from August 2019 to August 2020 through 37 design-related metrics.
By looking at a year’s worth of global events — which predated the start of pandemic shutdowns — we drew a comparative analysis between successful virtual and live event pages. We also analyzed the differences between the types of virtual event pages built before the pandemic and those built after the shutdowns started. We defined “successful events” by those with the highest attendance rates (ranging from 79.3% to 100%) and more than 100 registered attendees.
As with any type of event page layout, visual hierarchy and typographic rhythm play an important role to establish an easy-to-use, easy-to-navigate guest experience.
When font size, weight, case, and color combine to create a system where guests can clearly differentiate between well-defined levels of information, event organizers help guide their guests to find the information they need. This leads to higher conversion rates.
For example, Splash Creative recommends that event titles be the most prominent text on the page, followed by any registration button labels, section headers denoting content like speakers and schedules, and copy passages at a comfortable reading weight, size, and column width.
In our analysis of successful virtual events on Splash, median event title size was 2.8 rems, and median body copy size was 1 rem. While this ratio is actually slightly smaller than what we observed on pages for in-person events, it was still a significant size difference that was often paired with a font weight, case, or color difference to further distinguish between the two different content typologies.
This size contrast also represents a small reduction compared to data collected during the first three months of the pandemic, when 30% of successful virtual events used a type size contrast between titles and body copy of 3.5:1 or greater. A number of factors may contribute to this streamlining of type size, including desire on the part of event guests to be shown content that is less flashy and more direct.
The average total number of blocks, or content sections, was also much lower on virtual event pages than on in-person event pages at 5.8 versus 7.2, respectively.
This indicates that the required information needed to convey the most important details about a virtual event can be said more simply and in a more straightforward manner than on websites for in-person events.
On successful virtual event pages, registration buttons tend to be placed more thoughtfully within the layout than on websites for in-person events. The first time invitees encountered a registration button on a virtual event page was on the first block 77.1% of the time and on the second block 20% of the time.
This demonstrates that invitees are shown less unnecessary information on successful virtual event pages and are encouraged to register more quickly than on in-person event pages.
Adequate contrast between the foreground and background of a website is always important in web design to ensure legibility.
The vast majority (88.5%) of successful virtual event pages used primarily white backgrounds with black or dark grey as the body copy color. Majority white backgrounds are more prevalent in virtual events than in our last assessment of successful in-person event pages, when they accounted for 76.8% of the total. And data collected in the first three months of the pandemic showed that only 62.5% of successful virtual events used a primarily white background.
The data would indicate that over time, event organizers found that lighter pages drove more registrations and that guests were more engaged when viewing event pages with lighter backgrounds.
97.1% of virtual event pages passed an industry color accessibility standard, which measures color contrast adequacy for people with visual impairments as set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
This number is also higher than the percentage of sites hosting in-person events that passed, which may mean an increased general awareness of accessibility practices, a desire to make virtual events more visually clear, or a combination of the two.
Splash Creative recommends that registration buttons also use a strong color contrast with the background of the page, but in a way that should also be distinct from headlines and text.
The median contrast between buttons and page backgrounds was 6.6:1, and the average was 10.54:1. The industry standard for accessible color contrast ratio is 4.5:1, so these buttons that fell above this threshold provided a high-contrast, accessible visual experience.
Continuing a multi-year typographic trend in web design for events, sans serif fonts were broadly preferred over serif fonts. Serif fonts, in fact, have minimal usage in any of the most successful virtual event pages. Some custom, proprietary brand fonts were used on pages by Splash Enterprise event organizers, but most of the successful event pages leveraged open source fonts.
The most popular of those font choices were, in order of preference: Open Sans, used on 40% of successful event pages; Source Sans, used on 14.3%; and Roboto, used on 2.9%.
Email reminder timing is one of the most significant differences between virtual and live event pages on Splash. Successful virtual events sent reminder emails one day before the event 57.1% of the time, and one hour before 48.6% of the time. These overlapped significantly, so in many cases event organizers sent both reminders.
By contrast, successful in-person events pre-pandemic used a much more distributed email cadence, and only sent reminders one hour before the event 25.4% of the time.
Form design on successful virtual events differs from registration forms on in-person events in a few ways. The sharpest of these contrasts is in the style of the form. Successful virtual events used in-line forms 22.9% of the time, which was almost three times more common than on in-person events.
Average and median question counts, both for required questions and for the total number questions, were higher on virtual events than on in-person events. Successful virtual events asked 12.17 questions and required 10.29 questions on average, whereas in-person events asked 10.63 total questions on average and required just 8.18 questions.
This also represents an increase over data from the first three months of the pandemic, when an average of 8.9 questions appeared on the forms of successful virtual event pages.
Day of the week, duration, and time of day are huge factors when considering when to host a virtual event. Live events were more evenly distributed throughout the week, including evenings and weekends, but the timing for successful virtual events follows much narrower constraints.
Thursdays take a clear precedence over other days of the week for virtual events, with 42.9% of the most popular events being held on that day. The next most common day was Wednesday, with 28.6% of virtual events. When events are not purely social, a clear finding is that the middle of the week is a highly recommended time to host a virtual event. While practicing social distancing, this data indicates that attendees of virtual events want to maintain their work-life balance, keeping their working hours and weekends distinct.
The median duration of the most popular virtual events held on the Splash platform was one hour. (A few outlying longer events, upwards of 3.5 hours, bumped the average up to 1.375 hours.)
Virtual events are held at all hours of the day, but happen closer to the workday, with none in our research starting after 7 pm. Please note: These times don’t necessarily represent a specific time zone, but rather indicate local time zones.
The median start time for successful virtual events was 2 pm, and the average was 1:18 pm. This is a shift compared to data collected during the first three months of the pandemic, when the average start time was 11:43 am, indicating that event organizers learned organically that attendees of virtual events responded better to afternoon start times.
