Conference Scheduling Mobile App Design Project

CLIENT BREIF

Scenario given by professor: My team works for a consulting company. This company has a client that makes event planning software. The client wants to redesign their conference scheduling system and make it easy for conference attendees to use.

OBJECTIVE

Conference attendees need a way to learn about options and make decisions regarding how they want to spend their time at the conference.

USER RESEARCH

The team conducted one-on-one interviews with 6 individuals who have attended at least one conference in the past year. Participants were selected from a convenience sample of friends, co-workers, and family members who attended conferences for professional or personal interest.

Created a list of questions
- How often and for what purpose do they attend conferences?
- How do they pick which events at the conference they will attend?
- How do they know where to go when they are at the conference?
- Do they take notes? If so, how?
- Do they use social media when they are at the conference?
- Do they network? If so, how?
- Do they use a conference scheduling app?

Met with team to gain alignment over the questions

Conducted interviews with 2 of the 6 participants

Met with team to share results

Key themes
- Pain point: communicating changes
- Common goal: sharing information
- Two categories of conferences (career related, for fun)
- Navigation: signs, asking other people where to go, app notifications, maps
- Event schedule: personal interest, group consensus, plan in advance, plan at start of conference
- Note taking: everybody doesn’t take notes, preferred method = laptop or pen and paper, taking pictures of slides,
- Networking: share info with social media network, want easy way to share contact info, attendee list not used – opting instead for social media / word of mouth to find out who’s going

Created three Personas based on the research

Primary Persona

Secondary Persona

Tertiary Persona

Competitive Analysis

I Identified strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for 8 conference apps already on market. Took into account the other way of doing things such as, the paper schedule.

Looked at similar apps
- Found 8 similar conference apps

Looked at alternative ways to accomplish the task
- Paper schedule

Identified key dimensions where our app needs to be different
- Dimensions = Cost, speed, convenience, accuracy

Conducted SWOT analysis (+ unique things)

It is important to conduct a competitive analysis to identify how other apps in the market meet, or fail to, meet the needs of their users. It is also useful to know what features are common across these types of apps. If a feature is common, users might be expecting those features.

SWOT helps the team get a sense of what features are common across a set of conference apps. It is important to know this because users might expect certain features from this type of app based on other conference apps they have used in the past. Identifying these features will enable my team to not miss these opportunities when sketching a design

We did three things to build our list for which companies to look at
1. Asked people in the events planning industry about the apps they use for the conferences they organize
2. Talk to people we know and work with to find out what apps they for conferences.
3. Search the Google Play store to find conference apps that were available to download

After we had the list the first thing I did was build a basic list of the different types of things these apps could do. Then I looked for how the apps use different ways to accomplish the same goal. After that I looked for differences and points of uniqueness within each app.

After we knew the basic structure of an app we could decide what were points of weakness and points of strength.

From this competitive analysis activity, we were able to identify features of conference apps that were common across the market. We were also able to see what worked well and what did not work well by looking at these other apps.

SKETCHING

We met up to sketch some possible interface ideas. They were based on the info we learned from the user research and competitive analysis.

Round 1: everybody draws the screen, go around in a circle and everybody talks about their design and is critiqued on it.

Round 2: everybody draws the screen again but keeps in mind the criticisms and ideas generated from round 1

This process is repeated until the group goes through all of the screens within the scope of the exercise.

Prototype 1

After the sketching exercise, the team was aligned on which features we needed to include in the design and had a general sense of what they should look like. I took the designs we agreed on and converted them to an Axure Prototype. The plan was to create a clickable prototype so we could usability test it. Then, take what we learned from the usability test and create a final prototype.

The first problem I encountered was making sure the size of the prototype would match the phone we would use in the usability test. I had to test several sizes of the prototype before one fit properly on the iPhone we would be using for the test. Paying attention to this detail up front was important because it prevented issues on testing day.

The main focus of the app is the schedule. The user can select which day of the conference they want to find events for. They can also search or filter the events. Events on the schedule are divided into blocks of time because the user will only be able to attend one event in a given time block. Each event has a name, one-line description, clickable location, time duration, topic keywords, and a big plus to add the event to the schedule. If the user clicks on the event it opens an accordion dropdown with an image, full description and links to speaker info, discussion, and notes pages.

This design was chosen because it enables the user to quickly look through the available events during the time block and choose which one they want to go to. When making their decision, the user does not need to leave the page to see more information. They can quickly switch between the descriptions of the events in order to make their decision.

The location links to a map so the user can instantly see how far away they are from the events. If the conference takes up multiple floors or different buildings, users need a fast way to check if they will be able to get to their next event. The map uses GPS to identify where the user is and how far away the event is from them.

Once the schedule has been built the main focus of the app shifts to the “My Schedule” page. This is where the events the user selected will appear. They can scroll through the time blocks, click on the locations, remove the event, or add it to their external calendar.

The invitations page was not built out for this prototype. This page would have shown events that other users are inviting this user to go to.

Each event has notes and a discussion associated with it. The notes are a place where users can type in interesting information related to the talk. During the user research we learned that people want to be able to export the notes to a format where they can share them easily.

The discussion is a page where anybody attending the event can write in questions or talk about the event. This could be used in real time to help guide the speaker or to make sure they cover certain points.

Usability Testing

We evaluated the clickable Axure prototype by conducting six one-on-one moderated sessions in a formative usability study. Participants who matched one of our personas were recruited from friends and family.

The scope of the test was ease of navigation, understanding of icons and features, and relevance of current features to participants experiences.

To conduct the study, we used two conference rooms at Bentley University. One room for the participant, moderator, phone, and document camera. The other room for the note takers and live stream of the session. I moderated two of the sessions and took notes for the other sessions.

Before the sessions we created a moderator’s guide, so we would have consistency with the questions for the participants. The mod guild detailed the introduction we used with each participant. This included basic introduction, explanation of how the session will unfold, explanation of “think aloud” the role of the moderator as a neutral observer, and a reminder to point to the areas on the screen because of the document camera. After going over all of that I provided the consent form and explained it.

The second thing I did with participants was ask background questions about their phone and the conferences they attended. Then I gave them a scenario to help put them in the mindset of being at a work-related conference. Then I proceeded to give the participants tasks. Some of the tasks included looking for an event to attend and looking for speaker information. After going through the 8 tasks I conducted a quick post-session interview. The post-session interview focused on their general feelings towards our app and questions about specific things, such as feedback and sponsored advertising, that we did not include in the app but wanted more info about how our participants felt about these issues.

Note taking involved using a note taking grid set up to mirror the questions in the mod guild. All of the note takers used separate excel files to take notes. We chose to do it this way because if we had used a shared document, like google sheets, one note taker could have accidentally deleted the notes that another person was typing.

Analysis

Step 1 get alignment, note takers wrote down things participants said and did on post it notes

We used Mural, the online whiteboard web-app, to create an affinity map. Each participant was given a color. Each note taker wrote down things the participants said and did during the session on note cards.
Since there was 3 note takers for each session writing notes in 3 separate documents we needed a way to organize our findings before we could group them by topic. Each participant was assigned a color then the note takers added their findings for that participant in that color. Since we were using an online whiteboard, we all added our findings at the same time then had to go through the process of removing duplicate findings.
Everybody didn’t notice the same things. So, it was important to get all the things down in one place and get rid of the duplicates
to make this work we needed a space for each participant, the note takers then added the attitudes, aptitudes, and behaviors we uncovered during the test to the online whiteboard

Step 2

After all the findings were on the whiteboard app we started to move them around into groups, so we could identify themes and patterns. The groups of findings formed organically because certain findings were thematically related to other findings. After all of the findings were in groups we labeled the groups. This helped us make sense of the data we collected from the usability study. From this we were able to develop key themes of high level problems with the prototype we tested. There were problems relating to interaction, responsiveness, familiarity, and continuity that needed to be addressed in the final design.

Step 3 – recommendations

After looking at this data the team came up with recommendations for how to address the issues uncovered during the usability test. We created a simple system of color coded high medium and low priority labels for findings. We used these labels to prioritize the work of which findings need to be addressed immediately and which ones can wait. We tied the findings, labels, and recommendations to the design with arrows. We did this so that it would be easy to understand which problems related to which areas of the design.

Final Prototype

Created final design in sketch then uploaded to invision

https://invis.io/ZYCWMD9VW

Taking into consideration the problems and recommendations from the analysis of the usability study we created the final design for this project, using the combination of Sketch and InVision.

Key changes

Initial splash screen goes away without user needing to click through
Starting with an empty personalize schedule and show the user where to go to fill in the schedule through in-context help
Give users the choice to look for events based on topics or based on the time block
Change the add event to schedule interaction from a plus /minus sign into a checkbox. Because participants had a hard time understanding what the plus sign would do.
Date picker was changed from a drop down to a more visually appealing format
Created better way to add all events to the user’s personal calendar
When exploring events, users are shown which one of their friends/ collogues are attending a specific event.
Events can be found base on location
Search is featured in the explore tab