From guesswork to guest-first
Behind every marquee event is a staff working nonstop. I built an event management tool that made every table, seat, and guest easy to manage.
UX Research • UX Design • Figma • React-Based Development
Overview
For Golden Nugget Las Vegas, registration for flagship events (New Year’s Eve, the Super Bowl, and March Madness) still ran on pen-and-paper, Excel sheets, and a dry-erase board. The system not only slowed the team down but also depended heavily on the Executive Director of Marketing Operations, Ashley Blaska, whose decade of experience lived mostly in her head—leaving the entire process vulnerable if that knowledge ever walked out the door.
The Challenge
How might I help the Special Events team efficiently manage guest registration and seating across three unique events?
Solution & Impact
An event management system designed to handle each event’s quirks, allowing the Special Events team to quickly register guests and assign them to custom seating charts.
I interviewed GNLV's Special Events team and uncovered what's frustrating about their current process.
After interviewing Ashley and Lynn Murphy, GNLV's Special Event Manager, I found out the following:
Registration complexity
“Managing thousands of invitees in a single spreadsheet is overwhelming.”
Inefficient seating
“We’re still using a dry-erase board to mark seats—it’s slow and unwieldy.”
High risk of human error
"Because we track everything manually, it's easy to make mistakes."
Onboarding challenges
“It’s difficult to explain our current system to volunteers, so we end up just doing most of it.”
Design Process
Wireframing
After surfacing these insights, I moved on to laying out the initial interface.
Event title
Event management buttons
Select new event, manage event, and export data
Event analytics
Dashboard-style analytics to show broad guest information
Tabs
Toggle between Guest List and Seating Chart
Guest search
Search bar to enter guest's 14-digit account number or name
Guest list management
Sort buttons and options to mass register/delete
Guest card
High fidelity mockups
Ashley and I met regularly to test and refine designs across different parts of the system.
Event analytics
I organized the analytics view into four sections: Open Seats, Reserved Seats, Claimed Seats, and Unseated Guests. When hovered, each section has a tooltip for volunteers who may not be familiar with the system.
Guest cards
Guest cards displayed status at a glance with color-coded badges, along with quick actions to claim and unclaim seats (only available for reserved guests), or adjust seating.
Badges denoted status as follows: red = no table, yellow = reserved, green = claimed. For NYE, there was a fourth blue "Showroom" badge because the NYE party has a second venue with no assigned seating.
Tabling interface
I designed the tabling system like buckets of water: seats could be “poured” into one table or spread across several. Each bucket held 10 seats (12 for NYE) but could stretch to 15, so the interface needed a clear way to show when it was full and overflowing.
Every event had its own seating chart, but the underlying system is flexible enough to scale for all three.
Green represented claimed seats, which anchored to the bottom because they’re confirmed. Yellow represented reserved seats layered above. When the table exceeded its 10 (or 12 for NYE) limit, the outer ring displayed up to 5 (or 3) overflow seats.
Registration flow
With the system in place, I turned to designing the registration experience, focusing on efficiency and reducing the risk of human error.
Walk-in registration
Staff can register walk-ins with basic details and ticket count, or add them to the guest list for quick lookup later.
Seat assignment
If staff proceed with registration, they’re taken to the seating page, where a badge shows how many seats remain to be placed.
Table interaction
Staff drop seats from their cursor onto a table, preloaded with the guest’s selected seat count (the most common use case). Tables that can’t fit the seats in the cursor automatically disable, eliminating manual error-checking. Once seating is confirmed, the guest’s seats are marked as reserved or claimed.
Seat slider
As previously mentioned, the tool had to be able to both dump and distribute seats into tables like buckets of water. The slider determines how many seats a user can place at once, while a text badge displays how many remained to seat. As seats are assigned, the slider dynamically adjusts so its maximum value never exceeds the number of seats still available.
To keep the interface clean, the slider was placed in a dropdown rather than always visible. Since most guests only held two tickets, this prevented unnecessary clutter for the majority of cases.
Stakeholder Feedback
What did everybody think?
My time at GNLV wasn’t long enough to fully complete the event management system, but I created a functional prototype in React with the help of Claude Code to bring the concept to life. I worked with Ashley to test flows like guest registration and seating assignments, observing how she navigated the interface in real time. Seeing her interact with the system I designed was rewarding, even though I didn’t have the time or backend experience to fully build it out.
Towards the end of my internship, I had the privilege of presenting my work and a broader vision for modernizing the systems that Golden Nugget properties nationwide rely on in-house to leaders at GNLV and Landry’s corporate IT. Here's what some of them had to say:
"I've never seen information like this visualized this way before. It makes you wonder why we pay so much for third-party software." - Tony Cooper (VP of Casino and Hotel Technology; Landry's, Inc.)
"I'd imagine that there's a need for this sort of thing for a lot of other employees here." - Taylor Wescott (VP of IT; Landry's, Inc.)
"As someone who's had to volunteer for some of these events, I could really see this saving staff and guests a lot of time." - Holly O'Brien (VP of Marketing and Advertising, GNLV)
"Being able to use this would be huge. I really hope we can see it come together soon." - Ashley Blaska (Executive Director of Marketing Operations, GNLV)
Reflections
GNLV's resident Digital Marketing Product Design Intern
I started at GNLV this summer as a Digital Marketing Intern by title, but I was grateful for the chance to grow the role into something more by taking initiative. Though I had no formal UX oversight, the experience gave me the chance to take ownership and grow through the process. As my first project designing a platform from the ground up, it gave me invaluable lessons in problem-solving, thinking through interaction logic, and building confidence as a designer. I even walked out with a functional prototype.
Thank you to Ashley, Lynn, and the Golden Nugget Las Vegas team for the opportunity. I hope my work this summer help the Special Events team succeed in future events.