Feature Request Fest
Tradeshow booth turned user research lab the team and I designing five features, and let hundreds of clients tell us what mattered most.
We had an unusual problem...
Instead of picking one feature to prioritize, we designed
all five and brought them
to the clients.
Every two weeks, our cross-functional team meets to score incoming feature requests. Through an app called Product Board, we weigh engineering difficulty, design lift, urgency, competitive position, and client impact. It’s a rigorous process but in this particular cycle, we had an unusual situation. A cluster of small-to-medium features that all scored similarly, all needed similar effort, and all had real client demand behind them.
We also had our biggest tradeshow of the year coming up, Sports Inc., where thousands of current and potential clients visit the booth. Normally this event is for demos and new signups but this time we set up a testing station where a live (and somewhat captive) audience could tell us exactly what they wanted.
As design manager, my job was to get five features designed, validated,
and prototyped before the tradeshow.
I delegated features across myself, Andy, and Luisa based on complexity and bandwidth, ran our standard internal validation process for each, and made sure nothing fell through the cracks as we were working on everything simultaneously.
At the show itself, I set up the prototypes on the demo computers, trained our team on how to walk clients through them, and was on the floor collecting feedback in real time alongside everyone else.
Each feature was independently scoped and designed. We ran our standard critique and internal validation process but this time in a compressed timeline and all at once.
Demo Stores - Send a preview link to a client before the store goes live — no more requiring a full launch just for sign-off. Years on the request list.
Landing Page Enhancements - Add and remove stores from a landing page via dropdown — no more navigating between pages to make a simple connection.
Custom Order Statues - Create order statuses in your shop's own terminology instead of the platform defaults. Simple ask, high daily value.
Packing Slip Redesign -Larger product images, order status visibility, and a full usability overhaul for a better fulfillment experience.
Bulk Store Status Changes - Change store status across multiple stores at once — with rules for reopening, archiving, and protecting edge cases where status changes open or close live storefronts.
The Five Features
Paper Ballots, Online Surveys
& Real Reactions
We set up live prototypes on the demo computers at the booth alongside the usual sales activity. Clients could click through the designs, react in real time, and fill out a simple paper ballot ranking the features by importance to them. I wish i’d taken pics of our paper ballots.
Every evening the team debriefed. Every piece of good feedback that surfaced in conversation got shared. The pre-AI prototypes were occasionally clunky to click through, but having something visual to react to was indispensable. Almost every client had multiple favorites.
Quite a few said "just do all of them" — which was both validating and exactly the point. We wanted to know which ones they'd fight for if they could only have one.
Demo Stores (which had been on the request list for years) and Custom Statuses emerged as the clear priorities. Both have since shipped. The remaining features have a head start: designs, internal validation, and real client signal already in place.
More than the features themselves, this project proved that a tradeshow can be a research opportunity if you treat it like one. Most user research happens in a controlled setting, scheduled weeks in advance, with a handful of participants. This was the opposite. Hundreds of real clients in a high-energy environment, reacting to live prototypes with no script and no filter. It was actually so much fun!
That kind of feedback, the frustration, the delight, the "oh I've been waiting for this," was great validation after a sprint of scrambling. We got it for free by being in the right place with the right prototypes.
Two Clear Winners + More to come
5
Features designed
& prototyped
100s
Clients tested
& gave feedback
2
Features shipped,
& counting
Learnings
We knew that a tradeshow is a research opportunity if you treat it like one. But in the past we’d only spoken to hand picked clients in our Client Advisory Boards. Bringing prototypes instead of just finished products changed the entire nature of our client conversations — and gave us prioritization data that no internal scoring process could have produced on its own.