The trade fair in your pocket, for Hiswa Te Water

Like almost every comparable trade fair, Hiswa Te Water worked with a physical floor plan: visitors could see where exhibitors were, and that was it. Information about what was on offer, about the companies and about the activities at the fair was scattered across channels and not organised in one clear place. The Hiswa Te Water organisation wanted to give visitors and exhibitors more: better information about the companies present and about what they were showing, all in one place.

The starting point had two parts:

1. Visitors should get a distinctive experience and find the right stands without effort.
2. There had to be a way to answer questions about the fair's activities, its exhibitors and what they offered, online and straight away.

That expectation came with real reservations. A large share of the Hiswa Te Water audience is over 40 and not necessarily at home with digital tools. Within the management team, too, there was little experience with AI and what it would mean in practice. The question was mostly this: will all that information load correctly, and will this audience actually use it?

Working from a technical drawing of the venue, our team made the design, listening closely to how the map should look. That is deliberate: every fair can be laid out from scratch for the best possible experience, rather than being pushed into a fixed template.

During the build, stands shifted at the last minute and companies were added. Because the back end was set up so those changes could be made directly — redrawing and repositioning stands — this was absorbed without delaying the launch.

The map went live on 20 August and stayed available afterwards. The fair itself ran for 5 official days. Every figure in this case study was measured over the period from 20 August to 7 September.

For the Hiswa Te Water management team, the project mostly produced insight where there had been no data at all: what visitors look for, where they walk, which offering draws the most attention. Those insights translate directly into commercial opportunities for future editions, from premium visibility for exhibitors to sponsorship aimed at demonstrable interest.

The stand data across all 235 registered exhibitors shows, for example:

That the organisation can see, per stand, how many views, favourites and routes there were is exactly the kind of evidence you need to price and sell exhibitor packages for the next edition — and exactly what a paper floor plan could never give.

Because the map was online before the fair opened, visitors could read up and plan: they arrived with a purpose and knew which stands they wanted to see. After the fair everything stayed available, so information about companies and their offering was easy to find again.

To protect confidential business information, we give numbers here only — no names of individual exhibitors.

In practice the map worked as a “trade fair in your pocket”: everything about stands, offerings and activities available straight away, in the browser. Anyone who wanted it permanently on their phone could add it as an app, with no app store involved.

Not everything went smoothly. In the run-up, communication and deadlines could have been tighter. Even so, during the peak week with more than 14,000 visitors, there was not a single moment of alarm about whether the map was working.