Global Event Discovery & Calendar

Through two cross-functional workshops, journey mapping, taxonomy exercises, card sorting, competitive analysis, and stakeholder conversations, we explored how different audiences approach event discovery and where the current experience created unnecessary friction.

Some visitors arrive knowing exactly what they want to see. Others begin with a date, an art form, a venue, an organization, a price point, or simply the desire to do something interesting in New York City. The experience needed to support direct, intentional paths while also making room for exploration and surprise.

The discovery process transformed the project from an interface redesign into a broader product strategy for campus-wide event discovery.

• How might we help someone find a relevant event as quickly as possible?
• How might we make an extensive programming calendar feel inspiring rather than overwhelming?
• How might we represent the full campus without erasing the identity of its individual organizations?
• How might we make mobile discovery feel natural and efficient?
• How might we create a foundation that can evolve as personalization and new forms of event discovery become more central?

Lincoln Center acts as both a presenter and a gateway to the work of independent Resident Arts Organizations. Audiences may not always understand those organizational distinctions, but the distinctions still matter for branding, content ownership, event information, and ticketing.

This required product thinking beyond the interface. Information hierarchy, taxonomy, event metadata, organizational attribution, calls to action, and downstream ticketing behavior all had to work together as one comprehensible system.

1. 01Present the campus as a coherent cultural destination.
2. 02Preserve clear attribution and pathways to the organization presenting each event.

A static design would not have been enough to evaluate an experience with this much interaction, responsive behavior, and information complexity.

I developed the concept as a high-fidelity working prototype with functional filtering, date navigation, calendar actions, responsive layouts, and reusable interface patterns. Although it uses representative data, stakeholders and development teams can experience the proposed product directly rather than interpreting it through static screens.

Building the prototype helped close the distance between design intent and technical execution. Product questions surfaced earlier, interaction decisions became more concrete, and the team could assess the experience as a connected system.

• Evaluate the experience across desktop and mobile
• Test the hierarchy and density of event information
• Demonstrate browsing and filtering behaviors
• Identify content and metadata requirements
• Gather more useful stakeholder feedback
• Explore campaign and series-specific treatments
• Create a tangible basis for engineering estimates and implementation planning

The experience was designed around semantic structure, keyboard navigation, visible focus behavior, readable information hierarchy, sufficiently sized interactive controls, descriptive interface language, and interactions that do not depend exclusively on hover or visual cues.

The component-based approach creates a more sustainable accessibility foundation. Shared patterns can be tested, improved, and governed consistently rather than recreated independently across pages and campaigns.

Its content and presentation layers can also evolve without requiring the underlying discovery experience to be rebuilt, creating flexibility for new programming models, seasonal identities, and Lincoln Center’s future brand expression.

With the redesigned calendar now in formal development for a November 2026 launch, the measurement strategy will evaluate whether the finished product improves both discovery and meaningful audience action.

• Calendar visits and engaged sessions
• Events viewed per session
• Use of filters and date navigation
• Movement from calendar results to event-detail pages
• Ticket and outbound organization clicks
• Add-to-calendar and sharing actions
• Exploration across series and Resident Arts Organizations
• Mobile engagement and task completion
• Bounce and exit rates
• Time required to find a relevant event

The working prototype established a shared, tangible vision for the future of event discovery at Lincoln Center and provided the foundation for a formal product-development initiative scheduled to launch in November 2026.

It transformed an abstract modernization effort into a product that stakeholders could navigate, evaluate, and understand. The functional prototype clarified interaction requirements, content and metadata needs, responsive behavior, reusable component patterns, and the future relationship between the interface and Lincoln Center’s event APIs.

As the product moved into development, the prototype became more than a presentation tool. It served as a bridge between strategy, design, stakeholder alignment, and technical delivery.

Most importantly, the work reframed the calendar from a functional schedule into one of Lincoln Center’s most important audience products: a digital expression of everything happening across the campus and a primary path from curiosity to participation.