Evo: Event Management
Interaction Design • User Research • User Testing • Visual Design • Branding • Front End Development
A startup wanted to create an event management platform as a side business to their content capture services. When they captured content at an event it would automatically be uploaded and stored here.Tri-Digital had hired Blink UX - a design consulting agency to give them design plans for the EVO platform. Blink was able to start building the information architecture and run a first round user test, but due to budgetary restraints told Tri-Digital that they would do best to hire an in-house UX Designer for the project. I was interviewed and hired by the Senior Designer from Blink that had been working on the project. We had a two week overlap in which he onboarded me and gave me the general rundown of what had been accomplished and what needed to be accomplished moving forward.
Opportunity and Goals
Cut back production work back at the office
Allow clients to self author their event pages by adding text and video descriptions
Create individual pages for clients to view their event content
Things that had been accomplished when I was brought on
When I arrived the major structure of the product was in place and had been agreed upon. It was broken into three main sections (on the left hand side) including a user dashboard, a collaborator list and an approval queue.
Designing a basic architecture to upload and store media files
Some wireframes
First user test one of the major flows
Things that still needed to be done
Taking a deeper look into personas and conducting user interviews
Conversations and updates from the CEO of the company (who had been on maternity leave and had wanted to participate in the project architecture)
Visual Design Components
Research & Initial Customer Interviews
My first steps on the project involved talking to real customers of Tri-Digital as well as attending an event capture with our team to assist myself in research and define user roles. I was able to attend Tech Ready (Microsoft) and shadow in the team’s content capture. This experience helped me to define the personas I would be working with. I found the two biggest personas to ultimately be the ‘Site Admin’ and the ‘Brand Followers’
User Role 1: Admin
About: The site admin would control the event. They would set it up, approve content and manage any onsite recordings. They would be the point person for everything on the event.
Wants & Needs: Ease of use, A quick way to check on what’s done, Analytics to bring back to their company, To satisfy executives
Fusterations: Too busy, Manages two teams when collaborating with hired event/conference producers in addition to own team, Frequent phone calls and meetings, No easy way to get analytics.
User Role 2: Brand Followers
About: These are crazy loyal fans who are generally psyched to be at the event. When I met these people many of them were already asking when the online content would be posted so that they could rewatch their favorite talks.
Wants & Needs: A more personalized user experience, A way to follow companies of interest (for public events only), A playlist, Less confusing/changing organization of event sites
Frustrations: Finding content after conference, Missing out on overlapping talks during conference, event sites even within the same brand are subject to change structure often.
Wireframes In Omnigraffle
I was able to establish these event settings through my research speaking with event admins in addition to the research Blink had done during their first round user test.
After the personas and research had been created, I went back through the wireframes that Blink had started on and made updates. I created four sections within the Admin dashboard to provide quick updates on the event. This included Event Settings, Media (which content was uploaded and which was missing), Speaker (bios, schedules, addition info) and Storage & Analytics (overall statistics of the event). I put these together into an Axure click through to walk my executive team through. Once I had sign off on the wireframes and Axure click through, I began working with our offshore development team to start laying the foundation for the site.
Offshore Development
Above is an example of the types of documentation that I supplied to development.
One of the biggest struggles of this project was working with the offshore development team based in India. They were mostly back end developers and struggled with many front end design concepts. This team was also about 12 hours off schedule from me. I met with them every other night from 10-12pm for several months during the development of this project. To assist with the front end development I followed through with a plan that Blink UX recommended which was to use customizable Bootstrap components and provide in-depth CSS guidance in the redlines.
Brand
I created and developed a responsive Microsite to promote the product that included a customized Javascript countdown to the release, a features list and visuals that I would use later in the final products UI design.
In tandem with development getting started on wireframes, I was given the task of starting creating a brand for Evo. I created visual design components, a brand logo, iconography, photography, and designed and developed a microsite to promote the upcoming product release.
Here are some aspects of the style guide components that I created. From my research I knew that I wanted to give project managers three different options for event tiles depending on what was most important to that specific event. Sometimes it would be the event branding, other times it might be key speakers or the event description.
Deciding what would live on the Brand Followers Homescreen
Blink hadn’t had much time to define what would live on our user facing event event homepage. Even after doing my initial research at an actual event I still wasn’t sure exactly what the brand followers needed. I talked the company CEO into letting me run user interviews on event managers we had used in the past (they didn’t want me having direct contact with event attendees due to privacy issues).
I focused questions for these event managers around:
What information was most requested by attendees
Questions received in emails and calls after events
Generally prioritization of information from their point of view.
Through my gathered research I determined the following to be attendee needs:
A list of upcoming and past events that they had registered for.
A way to create a playlist of videos to watch later.
A list of upcoming events near them.
A way to follow events of interest.
Event Admin
During the user interviews that I performed for the customer facing experience, I also had a chance to run a mini user test on project managers using my Omnigraffle wireframes. I ran a task based user test on five individuals that lasted for approximately 30 minutes and allowed me to watch users engaging with the product. From this I determined changes that needed to be made including:
Event time zones needed to default to 12:00 and not the current time because most events were actually multi-day events and were not measured in increments of hours.
Admins wanted analytics and reporting on who was consuming content because oftentimes corporate events were private and wanted to know what clients were attending. This was added to the storage and analytics section of the events as a downloadable PDF due to both budget and amount of data that might be on that list.
Admins needed to be able to invite select people to view content prior to it’s approval. Sometimes this was a large number of executives. It was determined that a bulk add through an Outlook plugin was the best way to move forward with this.
There were too many steps between when an admin goes to create an event and publishes an event. I reduced the amount of clicks and condensed information to prioritize only necessary fields.
Admins wanted Instagram and Snapchat functionality added to make events more interactive (this was not added due to budget but was put on the list for a 1.2 release of EVO.
Final screens for the Admin user profile can be seen below.
This is the Admin’s dashboard where event details would be added and events would be created. (I can’t show the collaborators page because it has Microsoft specific fields)
This is the Analytics page for an event. It shows the amount of media storage an event has left as well as consumption by device breakdown, location and event traffic. Further metrics specific to video consumption are located in the top right hand corner as a PDF download.
Results & Learnings
Tri-Digital successfully launched the project and sold a number of subscriptions (primarily to Microsoft teams). They intended to build out more features that did not meet the project MVP once they had a larger budget for it (they’d invested quite a bit in building this product). The company is still around today and renamed itself as ‘Evia Events’.
The one thing that I really pushed for and wished that the team had a budget for were native apps. Attending a few conferences and events myself I noticed how engaged users were with conferences that offered mobile apps. I envisioned the app to be more than just the hosting site for video content but also a place where attendees could check the schedules and plan out their day. I mocked up up a prototype of this in Invision before leaving the company.
Working with an offshore development team with was VERY challenging. It wasn’t even just the language barrier and time difference but the cultural differences that were sometimes hard to navigate around. I was a young female designer directing a team of ten offshore male developers. It took them a while to respect my position. I ended up becoming friends with a few of them but even at the end of the project a couple of them still referred to me as ‘the female designer’. I realized the value of working at companies with in-house development teams from this experience.
Being a team of one and the only UX Designer was a difficult experience. I enjoyed some aspects of being in charge and getting to push myself harder than I had in previous positions but I found I really missed having a team to bounce ideas off of. In my next position I made sure that I had a team of more senior people that I could learn from.