Challenge

The most valuable thing at a professional festival is not the programme, it is the other people in the room.

Weekend Media Festival in Rovinj is a three-day industry event that pulls senior people from tech, digital, and creative fields into one place. Most festival apps are conference companions, schedule, map, venue info, the baseline every attendee expects. This one was built around a different bet: that people come for each other, not the timetable.

Three attendee types shaped the brief, senior leads looking to hire, founders seeking collaborators, specialists collecting ideas. One interface had to serve all three, with networking as the point and schedule, map, and venue as the supporting cast.

​

The Decision

I inverted the usual hierarchy and made networking the primary product.

Most festival apps are navigation tools with a social layer bolted on. This one flips that. Schedule and map are there because attendees need them. Networking is there because attendees actually want each other.

The interest-based matching system is the load-bearing decision. Five tags, Looking to Hire, Seeking Collaborators, Offering Mentorship, Looking to Learn, Exploring Opportunities, cover the real intent space of professional attendees without making anyone describe themselves in free text. The tags do the positioning, the match surfaces the person, the app handles the introduction.

​

Networking

Three steps from interest to human connection: match, propose, meet.

You set your interests in your profile, the app surfaces matches on tag overlap, and once a match appears you can propose a meeting or open a chat to sort it out. The taxonomy is deliberately non-exclusive, you can be Looking to Hire and Offering Mentorship at once, so the system shows every relevant match without forcing anyone to pick a single identity at the door.

​

Schedule and Notifications

The schedule is infrastructure, its job is to stop you missing sessions, not to compete for attention.

Each session shows speaker, topic, and stage, linked straight to the map. You save sessions to a personal schedule and get a push notification before they start. Notifications are opt-in and session-specific, save one and you get reminded, skip it and you are left alone.

​

Map Navigation

The map responds to what you are trying to do rather than showing everything at once.

The venue is the Old Tobacco Factory, a single site with 13 numbered halls. Stage locations highlight based on the session you have selected, so the map surfaces what matters at the moment it matters and drops the markers that do not.

​

Testing

I tested with people who had been to previous festivals and changed three things.

The matching flow got shorter between selecting an interest and making first contact, push notification timing was adjusted for how far attendees typically were from stages, and the map legend was refined for faster orientation on first open.

​

Result

30% more meaningful connections than the year before.

The app shipped for the 2017 Weekend Media Festival in Rovinj. Organisers reported 30% more meaningful connections than the previous year and a 20% rise in session attendance, and 90% of surveyed attendees found the app useful, with networking and schedule cited most often.