NAMM NeXT event promo banner — Insights for the Future of the Music Industry
Case Study — Trade Show Industry / E-Commerce Flow

NAMM Exhibit — An Audit-Driven Redesign

NAMM (the National Association of Music Merchants) runs the NAMM Show, a major annual trade show. Exhibitors reserve booth space, sponsorships, and add-ons through a purchase flow on namm.org — the redesign covered here.

"Exhibitor" and "Reserve a Booth" lived as two disconnected menu items for what was actually one workflow. Membership eligibility wasn't surfaced until deep into the process, and booth options were flattened onto one page with no logical order. I audited the live site screen by screen, then redesigned the flow around what the audit found.
Role
Senior UX/UI Designer
Focus
Exhibitor Booth Purchase Flow
Company
NAMM
Team
1 designer (me), 3 developers, 1 product manager, 2 stakeholders, 1 product owner
Duration
10 months
Tools
Figma, Adobe CC
Accessibility
Screen Reader Testing
50%
Reduction in time-on-site during the exhibitor purchase process
3
Problems found in the audit, each traced to a specific fix

My Role

I led UX/UI research and design for NAMM's exhibitor booth purchase flow — auditing the live site screen by screen, then redesigning booth selection, sponsorship, enhancements, and checkout across desktop and mobile.

I worked closely with NAMM's in-house graphic and visual design team to carry their brand into the redesigned interface, alongside three developers, a product manager, two stakeholders, and a product owner over ten months.

Research & Constraints

Exhibitor access was restricted by NAMM's vendor agreements, so I led with what I could control directly: a full screen-by-screen audit of the live site and a competitive teardown of how comparable trade shows solved the same problem. Usability findings from NAMM's product owner rounded out the picture.

Competitive Analysis — InfoComm Competitive Analysis — CES E-Commerce Benchmarking — Amazon Usability Testing — Led by Product Owner

Amazon's e-commerce patterns — cart behavior, product detail pages, live pricing — shaped the interaction model directly, translated onto a booth-and-sponsorship flow with variable, build-your-own pricing instead of a fixed retail cart.

The product owner's debriefs came through structured notes rather than raw sessions, so I cross-checked every claim against the audit before it became a design decision — the three problems below are where both sources agreed.
The Audit

Three problems, found on the live site

Rather than starting from a blank canvas, I went through the live exhibitor flow screen by screen and documented exactly what broke down. Three problems stood out.

1. One workflow, two menu items

"Reserve a Booth" and "Exhibit" sat in different columns of the same menu, with no sign they led to one process.

Current NAMM mega-menu showing Reserve a Booth and Exhibit as separate, disconnected links

Fixed with a single entry point

Exhibitors saw the membership requirement before investing any time in the form — instead of discovering it was required after they'd already started.

Redesigned Exhibit at NAMM welcome screen with booth benefits, show recap, and sign-in or guest options

2. A landing page with nothing to say

Generic copy, a broken video placeholder, and a CTA that just repeated the header button.

Current Exhibit at NAMM landing page with vague copy and a broken video placeholder

Fixed with one page, three steps

Every booth option sat in front of the exhibitor on one page, so no one had to leave, hunt for pricing elsewhere, and lose their place before deciding.

Redesigned unified Exhibit page with a clear stepper and real booth options in one page

3. Showcases and booths, stacked with no order

Both lived on one long page — booth options presented before the showcase choice that was supposed to come first.

Current site showing booth options and community showcases stacked on one long page with no hierarchy

Fixed with tabbed hierarchy

Booths, showcases, and sponsorship each had their own place, so exhibitors weren't scrolling past irrelevant content to find the option they actually needed.

Redesigned mobile navigation with breadcrumb and tabbed sections for Booth and Space Options, Showcases, and Sponsorship
View wireframe exploration in Figma →
View the same flow at high fidelity in Figma →
View the mobile prototype in Figma →
A Design Decision

Pricing that reacts as you build your booth

The Customized Booth Space option couldn't use a fixed price — cost depends on the length and width an exhibitor chooses. The modal recalculates the total live as those two fields change, on both desktop and mobile, so the number in front of the user is always the real one.

Desktop

Desktop customized booth space modal with live length and width pricing calculator

Mobile

Mobile customized booth space modal showing the same live pricing calculator
Final Execution

From vague copy to a real product page

The shipped product page replaced the old landing page's placeholder video and generic copy with an actual booth render, expandable specification sections, and a persistent price and cart bar. The final visual layer carries NAMM's brand identity end to end, built on a design token system inspired by Tailwind CSS's utility-first conventions for consistency across desktop and mobile.

The Shipped Flow — Booth Selection to Payment
Step 1 of the exhibitor flow — every boothspace option laid out on one page with live pricing
Step 1 — Choose Your Booth Space
Cart view showing selected booth space and sponsorship items with a running total
Cart
Product detail page for a booth package, with specs, key features, and add-to-cart pricing
Product Details
Company selection and payment plan options before order submission
Payment Options
Final invoice with balance due and a choice of payment methods
Confirmation

Confirmation offers hotel and visa help right where the user lands — instead of making them go find that page themselves.

View the final exhibitor workflow in Figma →

50% less time spent buying a booth.

Auditing the live site before redesigning it meant every change traced back to a specific, documented problem — not a guess. Unifying the workflow, surfacing membership requirements early, and reordering the page hierarchy cut the time exhibitors spent completing their purchase in half. That work ran alongside a broader NAMM redesign effort, during which overall customer retention rose 10% — this flow's direct, measured contribution is the time-on-site drop above.

Unified
Booth reservation and "Exhibitor" merged into one workflow
Upfront
Membership eligibility surfaced before the user invests any effort
On-brand
NAMM's visual identity carried through every screen, desktop to mobile
Ten months and three problems later, the biggest win wasn't a single screen — it was that every decision traced back to a documented problem on the live site, which is what made a 50% drop in time-on-site a believable, attributable result rather than a coincidence.

Looking back: not having direct access to exhibiting musicians is the one constraint I'd push back on harder today. The debriefs from NAMM's product owner were enough to find and fix three real problems, but secondhand findings can't surface what a moderated session would — the question a user can't articulate until you watch them get stuck. The audit caught what was broken; I would still have preferred to watch it break myself.

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