Virtual Conferencing Mobile App
Overview
MaestroConference has a powerful desktop-based conferencing application that supports up to 5,000 participants at a time. They specialize in virtual events with breakout groups that foster intimate, meaningful conversations for participants.
Problem
Busy virtual conference participants who want to join events and connect with people across the country don’t have a way to attend events somewhere other than their desktop computers at home or work.
Solution
I was one of three UX designers working with MaestroConference for a three-week sprint to design a mobile web app that extends the core functionality of MaestroConference’s product and replicates the social interactions of face-to-face conferences and seminars.
Discovery
During research, we interviewed webinar attendees on competitor platforms, current MaestroConference customers, and their participants. Interviews revealed that virtual conference participants care about…
Convenience
“Had they held this [conference] in person, I would not have attended. I wouldn’t have the time. I would have been interested in attending but that week, as many weeks seem to be now, was jam-packed. I was excited about not having to leave my desk and be able to engage with people from around the nation and not miss work time.” — Current participant
Networking
“I would have loved to been able to exchange contact info with the women I was in a breakout session with.” — Current customer
Sense of structure
Who’s in charge? Who’s speaking? What am I supposed to be doing?
“It can be confusing as to who should speak when.” — Current customer
The User Journey
With those user needs in mind, I brought the team together to map out our primary persona’s user journey so we would have a shared empathy for the users and uncover opportunities for design solutions.
Design Studio Ideation with Our Client
We met with Katherine, our primary stakeholder from MaestroConference, to share our research. We kicked off our brainstorming session with an empathy-building session. We talked about each of our two primary personas — Derek and Joan, then drew shoes to represent each of them. From there, we took two of our user needs statements and started sketching mobile solutions for them.
Iterations
During usability testing of two clickable prototypes, we asked users to complete the following tasks:
- Join a breakout room.
- Raise your hand in the breakout room.
- View the list of conference participants.
- Edit your profile.
Hypothesis 1
Actions like raise hand, mute/unmute, and ask a question as the only persistent navigation will make the interface easier to navigate because there is less clutter.
What we learned
Users clicked just about every where to try and find the breakout rooms.
“Especially on a touchscreen interface, you need some way of figuring out what an icon means or the icon’s useless.” — Male, 30s
Result
We moved important features like breakout rooms and participants to global navigation and we added labels to icons for learnability.
Hypothesis 2
Side navigation would let users easily participate in a conference and multi task because they can hold the smart phone in one hand.
What we learned
“I don’t like seeing all that stuff there. I want to click on [the navigation]. Do my thing. Then I don’t want to see it. I think it gets too distracting.” — Female, 40s
Result
We moved the navigation to the top and bottom of the interface to follow convention and improve learnability. We also separated the functionality between the top and bottom navigation. The bottom would be for the actions that a participant can take during an event: mute/unmute, raise your hand, and chat. The top would be for the locations and features: breakout rooms, participant lists, user profile.
Final Mockups
Client Testimonial
“Anna-Marie and I worked together on a UI/UX research & design project. She served as the account manager for the group of several designers working on creating a better mobile experience for participants in a virtual conference setting.
Anna-Marie did a great job of incorporating key insights from user research in the designs for the mobile experience. I highly recommend her if you need someone to figure out what customers want and design better ways of getting them what they need!” — Katharine Bierce, MaestroConference
