Rethinking an event schedule

Description

Attendee Hub is a mobile event app that provides conference-goers with event content and empowers face-to-face connections. 

The cornerstone of the event experience is its schedule of what is happening. The schedule displays the overall agenda, along with the attendee's personal schedule so they can navigate throughout an event with ease. This helps them accomplish their event goals and ensure they attend the sessions that are important to them.

Task at hand

There were several things we were hearing from customers and users of Cvent’s previous event app solution that we knew we wanted to keep in mind when we were beginning to design the schedule for Attendee Hub. 

• A clear way to differentiate your personal schedule from the overall event schedule

• Easily see free time in my personal schedule and let me know what sessions are available to go to 

• One solution that will work for both small events with just a few sessions, to large events with sometimes hundreds of sessions a day

Discovery

We began by interviewing internal stakeholders, such as client services and product, to understand what they were hearing from event planner clients about the current app. Then, partnering with user research, we performed a baseline user test on attendees to see what was working and what wasn’t with the existing app. We conducted a workshop centered around our attendee persona, and what he is seeing, feeling, thinking, and doing at an event, in hopes to discover how he might use the schedule. We gathered a ton of ideas, and it helped us really keep our minds open to all possibilities throughout the design process.

Sketches and wires

Armed with insights, data, analysis, and ideas, we got started on designs. At the time, we were beginning to design the information architecture of the app for what would be included in the early adopter version, and the schedule functionality was a big part of that. Below you can see my initial rough version of sketches converted into wires.

User testing, round one

Overall, users were largely favorable toward the wireframes they saw during this round of testing.

Wins

• Users correctly understood controls like filters to control their view of the content, swiping to view more sessions, and the button for adding to their schedule

• Users commented that seeing conflicts in their schedule was very easy and valuable if they were actually using this app

• Users commented that this schedule was clean and liked the layout (especially seeing side by side sessions and swiping to see more sessions)

Issues

• The difference between agenda, day, and my schedule is confusing and without actually interacting with these functions, users are very unsure how these were different views

• It was sometimes difficult for users to decipher the duration of a session

• Users did not see a ton of value in having the countdown time to next session area at the top and some were distracted by its prominence

Wires, round two

In addition to user testing, we collected feedback from stakeholders by sharing out the wires in a clickable Invision prototype. We also gathered feedback in design team crits. Then, it was time to get back into Sketch to revise and update the designs.

We made the following changes

• Simplified the navigation and the ways to view the schedule

• Differentiated the personal schedule from the all sessions list both in its timeline structure and visually

• Removed the noise of the countdown to the next session in the header and instead added a current time indicator into the list

Visual design

We were feeling like the wires were in a pretty good place, so we kicked off the visual design process. We were just starting to develop the design system for the app, so there were some components we knew we wanted to use, and some that we needed to design. With the visual design, we focused on the following:

• We wanted the personal schedule view to feel like a calendar view, showing the sessions as blocks of time that changed size depending on its duration. Tapping on a session would lead to a detail view with more information about the session, so we knew we wanted the blocks to feel tappable.

• The all sessions list should feel like a catalog of available sessions and easily distinguishable from the personal schedule

• The interface was information-heavy, so we wanted to keep the design clean to allow for quick scanning

• In order to accommodate the event planner’s personal branding for their event, the schedule needed to be easily themed

We went through several rounds of visual design, gaining feedback from other designers in critiques along the way. Once we had a version we were feeling good about, we did another round of user testing. We were able to quickly identify what was and wasn’t working, and then did one final round of visual design. Below is where we landed.

Measuring success

When the early adopter version of the app launched, it was very exciting to get the product in the hands of our users. Initial feedback was extremely positive, with the highlights being the calendar view of the personal schedule, as well as the ways to quickly spot free time and fill it with something. We’re closely monitoring how our customers use the new schedule to build out their event agenda, and making adjustments based on feedback and needs.

We can’t wait to see how the schedule evolves as we get more users onboarded and learn more about how they use it to accomplish their event goals.

Download the Cvent Events app.