PBGH Event Page System

Role: Senior UX Designer (Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Design Systems)
Product: Webinar and event pages across multiple internal programs

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Context

Purchaser Business Group on Health (PBGH) operates as a coalition of independent programs (e.g., California Quality Collaborative, maternity initiatives, clinical quality teams), each responsible for planning and publishing its own events.

Webinars are a primary mechanism for education and engagement, but ownership is distributed:
individual program managers create and maintain their own event pages, often without coordination across teams.

This created a dual challenge:

• Event pages needed to work for external users making time-sensitive decisions
• The system also needed to be usable and flexible for non-technical internal owners with varying needs and priorities

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Problem Framing

The initial request was positioned as a visual refresh of webinar pages, but early exploration revealed a broader product problem: PBGH did not have a coherent event experience—only isolated pages.

Key issues:

• Inconsistent importance signaling: Webinars used the same page structure as static internal content, obscuring their time-sensitive nature.
• Temporal confusion: Users routinely missed or forgot when events were happening, even when dates were technically present.
• Unclear primary action: Registration paths were buried, forcing users to search for the next step.
• Overloaded content blocks: Speakers, resources, and descriptions were combined into long linear text, increasing cognitive load.
• No defined post-event state: Once an event ended, pages failed to clearly transition to recordings and materials.

Internally, each program needed slightly different content—but without shared patterns, every page became a one-off solution.

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Design Goals

1. Make the user’s next action obvious within seconds
2. Reduce cognitive load around time, relevance, and registration
3. Support multiple event types and content variations without fragmenting the experience
4. Enable consistency across programs without requiring centralized oversight

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Approach

Designing around user decisions, not content volume

I reframed the page around the primary question users arrive with: “Is this relevant to me, and what do I need to do right now?”

This led to a clear hierarchy:

• Event title, date/time, and call-to-action placed in the header
• A countdown indicator to reinforce temporal context
• Registration or viewing as the dominant action, depending on event state

Making time a first-class element

Rather than treating the date as metadata, time became an interaction signal. The countdown pattern reduced ambiguity and helped users quickly orient themselves without doing mental math.

Structuring for scanning and reuse

Content was reorganized into modular sections:

• Overview
• Speakers
• Resources
• On-demand viewing

Each section could be toggled on or off, allowing program teams to tailor pages without breaking consistency. This modularity allowed the same system to scale beyond webinars to retreats, seminars, and multi-day events.

Designing for decentralized ownership

Because program managers work independently—and often do not coordinate across teams—the system was designed to:

• Tolerate variation in content completeness
• Maintain visual and interaction consistency even when used differently
• Reduce the need for custom layouts or ad-hoc requests

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Outcome

• Event pages now clearly communicate urgency, relevance, and next steps
• Users can quickly register, evaluate, or revisit events without scanning dense content
• The webinar template evolved into a reusable event page system adopted across programs
• The system scaled organically to support additional event types, signaling internal success

Most importantly, the design shifted PBGH from thinking in terms of “web pages” to thinking in terms of event experiences with distinct states (upcoming, live, on-demand).