An easy way for users to see what order speakers are presenting their presentations and be able to plan their day at the event. To be able to see the presentation title and abstract along.
Accommodate single track events and multiple track events.
On a multi track event there could be a maximum of six tracks running simultaneously.
Minimum presentation length will be at least twenty minutes, the maximum is one hour.
Each track could potentially have a different start time and end time.
Two Presentation types.Regular presentation: one speaker.Panel session:up to 4 panelists.
Three Track EventThis is a current 3 track agenda (the further into the future an event the less likely there will be an agenda made up for it).
UX PIN prototypeThis is an early prototype to see how the fixed elements would work alongside the agenda.
UX PIN 5 track AgendaThis is an early prototype for a 5 track agenda.
The agenda is the most used page on the site. It’s used to entice people into buying a ticket for the event, but also on the day of the event to navigate to which ever presentation they are interested in. Which means on the user end it needs to be easy to navigate on mobile devices (people do bring laptops to events but It’s not ideal to be carrying an open laptop around with you). Also the CMS must be easy to update for event organisers as speaking slots change throughout the day sometimes at very short notice.
The original agenda filled its function well enough, it was responsive and you could see what company was speaking and when. If this page didn't need any new features or requirements it would just be restyled to matched to the new style guide.
How ever a new type of agenda was required as we were producing more events it made sense for them to have some at the same venue as it was cheaper than renting out two totally different venues. This now meant that as multiple events were in the same venue the possibility of attendees wanting to skip between events was a possibility/ new revenue driver.
So a New agenda that facilitated multiple tracks was required. As this was a brand new type of Agenda some interviews were carried out with event organisers to make sure everyone agreed on what requirements multitrack agenda was and so that any solutions would meet all of these requirements
So my first thoughts were that there are two very different agendas that are needed, a single track agenda where there is only one row of presentations and a multi track agenda where there is multiple rows. The single track is definitely a lot simpler than a multi-track agenda. The multi-track agenda has so many more parts just by nature and these all must fit together perfectly
The Single track agenda is linear, There is only one route from start to finish.
The Multi track is where multiple tracks run alongside each other and a delegate can move between tracks.
One of the issues that I came across first was that these presentations didn’t always start or finish at the same time so this would have to be clear to the user.
ProblemThis could easily lead a user who was browsing through the agenda to believe that all these presentations were the same length of time.
SolutionThis was a lot was easier for users to see the difference between the lengths of presentations.
The vertical space between the presentations has to be taken into account, It has to be included as part of the presentation card height otherwise it mucks up the time accuracy if there are different amount of presentations on each track.
ProblemIt looks like the 2nd Track finishes 5 mins earlier the more this happens the bigger the gap gets.
SolutionBy including the gap within the presentation card everything starts and finishes where it should.
Every event has a registration period of around one and a half hours where delegates can come in and register then have breakfast. At the end of day one there is networking drinks that lasts potentially two hours. The issue with these is that on a time accurate agenda takes up a lot of space, and looks like a delegate is paying for a day where the majority is registration or network drinks.
ProblemShowing a time accurate breakfast/registration really shows how big it is compared to a presentation, and could potentially put delegates off.
SolutionHeads & Tails style slotThis alternate time slot is used to hide the amount of room an accurate timed registration or networking drinks will take up. It will only work at the start or end of a day. It is the only part of a multi track agenda that isn't time accurate.
When there is enough room we show multiple tracks next to each other, as its alot easier to understand and plan a day, However when there isn’t enough room to show tracks next to each other we revert back to the single track view with a tab down the left hand side to select which track the user wants.
Responsive changes Multi to a single track (With track filter) type agenda view when there isn’t enough space.
This displays all the presentations in a way that is easy to plan, which is great when you have a screen big enough to do this.
Now there isn’t enough room to display the presentations side by side. The agenda now turns into the single track view. The single track view display is more like the single track event but with a tab system to change which track is displaying.
The tab now becomes a dropdown for selecting which track is displaying.
It was important to work out the different presentation card types, and how they would work across the two different agenda types.
The presentation card opens up and pushes everything below it down.
As the presentation card can't slide down like on a single track, as that would throw everything off time that was below it, We used a modal to overcome this issue.
First attempt at putting some ideas together for the presentation cards.
The top bar works well on regular presentations with one speaker and leaves enough room for long names and job titles.
Fairly happy with this but with so little space on the multi track agenda this will not work.
The speaker profile picture and the presentation time get closer together as the screen width reduces.
Panel Session open suffers with speaker headshot being repeated as there isnt enough room to have the names near the top stripe, and didn't want the headshots to disappear and leave an empty top stripe.
Fairly happy with this on a regular presentation the open card could potentially display speakers social media links in the expanded sidebar.
The panel session closed just doesn't look right with the four speaker headshots.
This was by far the most vanilla option however with all of the space constraints of the multi track agenda cards this could be the only option available.
The card slides open the same as a regular presentation to reveal the panelists names.
So I knew that space in the time relative cards would be limited but wanted to get a better idea of this, I tested out a few different scales and padding options but this worked the best. Too small and there was no room in the standard thirty minute presentation, Too much and the one hour presentation looks massive and empty.
The job title was removed to free up some space, (it re-appears once the card is opened) But there really isn't too much room for decoration, and I think it needs to be consistent from single track view to multi track view. So the plain option is looking like a winner at the moment.
After making the high fidelity concepts I was lucky enough to have a developer, code a working prototype, the complexity of the different tracks was too much to build in a prototyping application like UX PIN or invision.