A four-day sprint to get more people through Neptune’s doors
Neptune wanted to bring more people into stores through events — but their current system made discovery and booking almost impossible.
Bringing more customers into stores through events.
The challenge
Neptune wanted to increase in-store traffic by using events — but the current experience made it hard for customers to find or sign up for them.
We kicked off a four-day Design Sprint to explore how we could make it easier for customers to discover, book, and attend local events while giving store teams a simple way to create and manage them.
From early conversations, we surfaced a few key challenges:
- Events were hidden inside blog posts — difficult to find and not searchable.
- Each store was running its own events with little consistency.
- Managing updates, cancellations, and pricing was time-consuming.
- The current design didn’t support the scale of multiple stores and event types.
Our goal was to make attending a Neptune event as effortless as buying a product online.
Monday: Framing the problem
We started the sprint by defining success.
Long term goal
In two months time, we want customers finding and attending Neptune events near them, resulting in around 75% capacity of people at events
Sprint questions
- Can we have stores update and create their own events?
- Can we remind people about the event they signed up for?
- Can we entice sign-up by showing previous event videos/images?
We reviewed event experiences from brands like SpaceNK and Apple, mapping out the customer journey from discovering an event to attending it.
This helped us spot friction points and focus our efforts on the discovery and booking stages.
Tuesday: Shaping the solution
After a quick playback with the Neptune team, we aligned on a phased approach — something that could go live quickly, but scale over time.
Our key decision: use Eventbrite as the underlying platform.
It offered:
- A proven event management flow
- Built-in payment and reminder functionality
- An API that we had previously integrated with
This would let us test the concept fast while planning for deeper integration into neptune.com later.
From there, we moved into storyboarding and rapid prototyping, working in pairs to accelerate design decisions.
The outcomes
In just two days of prototyping and iteration, we delivered:
- Mobile-first designs for key event discovery and booking pages (Phase 1 & 2)
- A clear implementation card in the product backlog
- Validation that we could work fast and align multiple stakeholders in under a week
The sprint also set a precedent for how Neptune could tackle future challenges — combining customer experience, operational efficiency, and scalable design into one rapid process.
Key takeaway:
A focused four-day Design Sprint turned a vague question — “How do we get more people into stores?” — into a tangible, validated solution ready for build.
