Helping 250,000 festival-goers and 5,000 volunteers at the Paléo Festival

For festival-goers, the Paléo Festival Nyon lasts six days. For those who build this ephemeral city from the ground up every year, it lasts three months. And the team of permanent staff spends the whole year focused on this one exceptional week.

The festival may be one of the most established in Europe, with a remarkably loyal audience, but it operates in a landscape that is changing. Festivals are multiplying, offerings are diversifying, audience expectations are rising. It is no longer just the line-up that makes the difference, but the entire lived experience.

And that experience is made up of dozens of small moments. Trying to buy a ticket several months in advance, making the trip by train to the festival, figuring out how your wristband works, feeling well welcomed when you arrive for the first time. Moments that are invisible when they work, but that leave a lasting impression when they break down.

On top of that comes internal complexity. The event mobilises around fifty permanent staff year-round, contractors, and nearly 5,000 volunteer collaborators during the festival. Teams who know their own area inside out, but who rarely see what festival-goers experience at the junctions between those areas.

Before proposing anything, you have to understand. In 2018, on the eve of a major redevelopment of the grounds for the 44th edition, with the construction of a new rail depot that would reshuffle the site’s urban planning, Paléo commissioned Akiani to assess the signage and information aimed at festival-goers.

The approach combined two complementary methods during the festival’s 43rd edition. A quantitative study of 980 respondents, through online and face-to-face questionnaires, was carried out by an internal team. A qualitative approach was carried out by Akiani, combining the shadowing of festival-goer journeys, observations at strategic points, and interviews with 60 festival-goers. Priority was given to newcomers and first-time visitors. We also conducted interviews with 12 heads of volunteer teams. The two approaches were synchronised.

What the field study reveals

The public finds its way using the stages, the colours of the marquees, the types of stands. But the sector names written on the panels only mean something to the teams working on the ground. The same goes for the “job” terms (Main desk, Wristband exchange, Accreditations), which create confusion. The signage, accumulated layer by layer over successive editions, creates a millefeuille effect. Each addition had its own logic, but together they form a patchwork that is hard to read. And once past the entrances, there is very little guidance to be found on the ground.

Demonstrating the value of qualitative approaches

After the 2018 festival, Akiani was invited to present the study’s results to around a hundred members of the organising committee at the debrief that follows each edition. Twenty minutes to share what the field had revealed and to create a shift in perspective among an audience that knows the festival by heart, but from the inside.

We took a strong angle. We started with the quantitative results. 80% satisfaction with the signage. “Fairly reassuring as a finding, isn’t it? You could tell yourself everything is going just fine.”

From observations to identifying breaking points

These cases are not anecdotes. They are breaks in the experience chain, invisible from inside the organisation, but lived by hundreds of people every edition.

Teams that have worked side by side for years become aware that their sectors create unintended friction between them. Following the presentation, two sectors got together to discuss a tool that one of them was developing and that turned out to be exactly what the other needed.

To conclude this assessment, the deliverable set out recommendations and laid down three founding principles: coordination between sectors, continuous information on the ground, observation of real usage. This became the basis for a co-construction that would last.

From 2019, the first changes whose effects are measured in the field

Following this first project, the team was present again for the 44th edition in 2019. The festival had begun acting on the recommendations: a mobile information team was tested in the field, the maps were reworked to better match festival-goers’ mental model. Akiani was there to observe how these first design choices behaved in a real situation. It was also a chance to observe other places, moments and situations, and to inform our thinking on the urban-planning changes ahead.

Then COVID brought everything to a halt. Two editions cancelled. The return would wait until 2022.

After the forced interruption, the return following two cancelled editions could have happened identically. Yet Paléo chose to make it a moment of transformation. In 2022, the festival took on an ambitious project: digitising its welcome and access processes. A move to cashless, electronic access control via Weezevent, an overhaul of the badge and pairing system. Changes that simultaneously affect festival-goers’ experience and the internal organisation of the teams.

Digitising ticketing and rolling out No Cash

At that point, a new dimension opened up in the collaboration. Improving the experience could no longer be thought of from the public’s side alone. For that, you have to understand how the job-role teams work, where the redundancies or the gaps are. We look for what plays out at the junctions between sectors.

In the lead-up to the festival, we organised a series of workshops to map the journeys according to the different profiles. We worked first on festival-goers, then volunteers, accreditation holders and sponsors. This work was then formatted and shared with the whole project team. It made it easy to identify the similarities and differences in processes and tools. Above all, this mapping-out of the various journeys served as a common language for what followed. It laid the groundwork to evolve procedures, think through the integration of tools and technology, and address the priority issues to resolve.

During the festival, we ran a live sharing session with the various stakeholders, right in the middle of the edition, to gather feedback from the ground and take the temperature. A few weeks after the festival, these notes were taken up as input for a retrospective workshop. Everyone shared what they had learned from the others, what had worked well in their view, and only then the things they had been missing. This kind of exercise reinforces the group in a positive dynamic of improving together, thanks to the circulation of information and a unified shared vision.

Creating a central place to welcome and guide the public

At the end of 2022, the team entrusted us with a second project. The organisation planned to create a centralised welcome space for the public, close to the main entrance. A physical space designed to bring together services that had until then been scattered, to reduce the “bounce effects” identified in 2018, and to offer a coherent first point of contact on arrival. So we ran an on-site service design workshop, using the journeys modelled earlier. It was the way to set out the necessary functions while projecting them into space (on the maps and on the ground).

Among the complex topics, there was notably the question of moving the desk dedicated to volunteers. For years it had sat inside the festival zone. As numbers grew and the welcome function became ever more central, the original space became too tight. Moving it next to the other welcome desks turned out to be a good opportunity to streamline how things worked.

Measuring the effects in the field

From the 2023 edition, the team came back to observe how festival-goers and teams took ownership of this welcome tent. We ran a debrief with the project team to build on the lessons learned. In 2024, the festival called on Akiani for a seemingly more modest topic concerning the signage and guidance of the toilet blocks. But behind the question of the toilets, we find the same challenges as in 2018: flows, legibility at “high tide”, night-time wayfinding, areas without guidance. Here again, we proposed recommendations upstream and were present in the field during the edition to assess the effects of the new proposals.

One blind spot remained: the 5,000 volunteers who keep the festival running. Well, not quite, because on each project we regularly drew on the 5,000 pairs of eyes and ears that make the festival. A long-running immersion that lets us build ties across different sectors. The ideal way to bring feedback from the ground together in one place.

Working on the volunteers’ welcome circuit

Until then, each sector handled the badge handover and the welcome of its volunteers on arrival in its own way. A strong heterogeneity, sector heads carrying this load alone, and new volunteers sometimes left without bearings. In 2025, the festival wanted to test another model, thinking through a centralised welcome entrusted to the Administration, Welcome & Safety team.

In the lead-up to the festival, Akiani conducted 6 in-depth individual interviews with the heads of the Cleaning sector (the pilot sector chosen for its size of 300 volunteers) and with the Admin W&S team. A summary note set out concrete recommendations on procedures, guidance, communication and the handling of special cases (late arrivals, handover to a trusted third party, new volunteers without bearings).

Identifying service needs in real situations

During the festival, the team was on site as close as possible to the teams and the flows. So we made real-time observations, documented what was happening, what was working and what was not going as planned. The pilot was a success. Zero volunteers lost among the 300 of the Cleaning sector. No uncontrollable wave of arrivals. Clear satisfaction from both teams. One of the sector heads sums up the pilot’s positive impact: “It’s really great to be able to offload that, it takes away that weight.”

At the same time, we took advantage of being on site to go and meet other volunteers from other sectors and question them. The aim was then to identify which services volunteers most expect, on arrival and throughout their time on site. Observations in the welcome area brought out some very interesting initiatives (charging phones, building connections with a newcomers’ drinks gathering, livening up the group with a raffle, drawing people in with a photobooth) that meet real needs.

After the event, a report summarised the lessons from the pilot and set out strategic directions for what comes next.

Mapping the desks serving the staff

At the end of 2025, a workshop brought together 9 representatives from 6 different sectors to map all the festival’s “volunteer desks”. For the first time, teams working a few metres apart shared their practices, their resources, their constraints. The workshop produced a shared reference that captures the missions, actions and options of each welcome point. This creates a working basis to evolve the range of services to volunteers over time.

First, the three-part arc (festival-goers, job roles, volunteers) was not planned. Yet it built itself organically, each intervention revealing the next layer. But what stays constant across these years of collaboration is a presence before and during each edition. Not to control, but to learn. Concretely, the recommendations are shaped upstream, tested against reality during the festival’s six days, and refined right afterwards. It is this field presence that gives value to the analyses and legitimacy to the recommendations.

With time, a good understanding of how things work internally and the input of feedback from the ground now bring about strategic conversations. A possibility that only a long-term relationship makes possible. And sometimes, an intervention reveals invisible links. That is the case, for example, between two sectors that did not know they were working on the same question. Or between a local practice and a global challenge. Or even between what we think we know about the experience and what the field really shows.

Stepping back, all the questions we ask ourselves with the Paléo teams, we encounter in every sector. How do you observe what end users really experience? What can be done to bring on board the teams who deliver the service? With what method can you think of the experience as an ecosystem rather than as a sum of moments?

For 2026, new thinking is already under way on the wayfinding and display of the offering in the bars. A topic that takes us right back to where it all started, the festival-goer’s experience in the physical space of the festival, and a reminder that the cycle of observation never really stops.

The events sector is (very) interested in user-centred approaches

Since the first projects with Paléo, we have had several opportunities to share these experiences in specialised training sessions with the Swiss Institute of Urban and Event Security (opens in new window) (ISSUE).

Last year, we brought together what we learned in projects with festivals and other major events into a conference (replay available).

Finally, we got to talk about our approach to experience and service design in front of 150 event-security professionals at the first French-language conference on the topic in early 2026.