Challenge

Weekend Media Festival in Rovinj is a three-day industry event bringing together senior professionals from tech, digital, and creative fields. Festival apps are conference companions — schedule, map, and venue information are the baseline every attendee expects. This one was designed around something different: the idea that the most valuable thing at a professional festival isn’t the programme, it’s the other people in the room.

Three attendee types defined the brief: senior leads looking to hire, founders seeking collaborators, specialists collecting ideas. The app needed to serve all three through one interface — with networking as the differentiating feature and schedule, map, and venue information as supporting infrastructure.

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The Decision

Most festival apps are navigation tools with a social layer bolted on. This one inverts that hierarchy. Networking is the primary product. Schedule and map are present because attendees need them. Networking is present 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 realistic intent space of professional conference attendees without requiring them to describe themselves in free text. The tags do the positioning work. The match surfaces the person. The app handles the introduction.

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Networking

Users set their interests in their profile. The app surfaces matches based on tag overlap. Once a match appears, users can propose a meeting directly or open a chat to coordinate. The flow is three steps: match, propose, meet. No friction between the interest signal and the human connection.

The tag taxonomy was designed to be mutually non-exclusive — an attendee can be Looking to Hire and Offering Mentorship simultaneously. The system surfaces all relevant matches without requiring users to choose a single identity at the door.

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Schedule and Notifications

Each session surfaces speaker, topic, and stage location linked directly to the map. Users can save sessions to a personal schedule and receive push notifications before they start. The notifications are opt-in and session-specific — attendees who save a session get reminded, those who don’t are left alone.

The schedule feature is infrastructure. Its job is to reduce missed sessions, not to compete with the networking feature for attention.

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Map Navigation

The venue is the Old Tobacco Factory — a single-site festival with 13 numbered halls. Stage locations highlight dynamically based on the selected session, so the map responds to what the attendee is trying to do rather than showing everything at once. Unnecessary markers removed. The map shows what matters at the moment it matters.

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Testing

I ran usability sessions with attendees from previous festival years. Key changes from feedback: the matching flow simplified to reduce steps between interest selection and first contact; push notification timing adjusted based on how far attendees typically were from stages; the map legend refined for faster orientation on first open.

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Result

The app shipped for the 2017 Weekend Media Festival in Rovinj. Reported by festival organisers: 30% more meaningful connections compared to the previous year, 20% increase in session attendance. 90% of surveyed attendees found the app useful, with networking and schedule features cited most frequently.

The app shipped. The festival ran. The brief is closed.