Visualizing, Digitising, and Executing a 2 day online Digital Conference -DesignNXT2020
OVERVIEW
Web conferences are the next thing to stay connected with your audience and what if you are hosting it yourself. It’s like being an event manager for your own wedding and even attending it on the sideline. Yes! that’s the precise feeling you get when you wrap up this event. It just happened with us when we hosted DesignNXT 2020. This article talks about what are the design details that you need to visualize and work upon. How should the team working on it be structured and what are design details that need to be considered including various departments that need to coordinate this activity and make it successful.
Planning stage
As DesignNXT was our first Design Web Conference for the external audience, it was a clean slate to start with. It meant that what we do would set a standard for web conferences hosted by the Globant Design team in the subsequent years.
As designers, we started our primary research. We started looking at our own premium web conferences of the NXT series. First, we needed to decide the theme, date, and schedule. At Globant, our work focuses on Digital transformation and design for the future. We work on the Augmented design, future UI, AR/VR, conversational design, accessibility, and many more. Thus these topics largely fell under the umbrella of Speculative Design and thus came our theme.
Deciding the date and time
Our audience is the working professional and students, who would be able to give their time to the conference on a Friday evening and Saturday morning felt like a perfect slot. So we broke it into 2 days with 3 hours the average time. Also, we had to make a calculated guess of the time zone. So we started putting up a calendar of dates. With a process of trial and elimination, 9th October 4:30 pm IST — 8:00 pm IST & 10th October 10:00 am IST — 1:00 pm IST seemed fit and perfect.
Structuring the conference
To have an engaging experience in a web conference, it’s very necessary to have different flavors. We wanted to make it fun with a mixture of presentations & discussions, learnings, and interactive activities. We jotted a schedule of what can be presented in which format. Our higher-level schedule got designed as follows. Globant work — as presentations & discussions, Learnings of prototyping tools, AR/VR, Futuristic UI — as presentations with learnings, Hands-on tutorials — as workshops, and Fun Design Activity — as breakout room workshops. It has a good mix of things and an interesting area for all the participants who would attend the conference.
Logo design and Branding
Talking about the Logo, we wanted the logo to be a hallmark that would represent the event theme which was “Speculative design”. Also, this would be paired with the NXT logo which is already an established identity for such events across Globant.
It started with brainstorming. Translating thoughts into word clouds, sketches, and converging into elements and forms that could combine and translate individual characteristics to create a meaningful concept. Here is the formulation of the core idea.
The letter D represents Design as a Function/Event. Combining it with Waves which are associated with progression as well as the obscure nature of the event theme. The forward arrow suggests the direction and portrays forward-thinking.
Here is the construction that helped fuse in the elements and shapes the character of the logo.
And the final logo we came up with is …
PRE EVENT — PLANNING
We brainstormed about the different social spaces we are targeting and touchpoints to maximize the digital footprints. We zeroed down on Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin, as most of the participants were active on these platforms.
Defining Hashtags for the event-Be creative yet stick to the theme for your event when it comes to using hashtags. We used #DesignNXT2020 #designatglobant #globantindia #globantdesign #bespeculative #speculativedesign in all of our posts & stories. We asked our participants as well to use these hashtag
DesignNXT AR block: You need that “wow” factor to add spice and promote your event even more. Our in-house amazing designers came up with a small AR block to give more boost to the event. This caught all the attention & we saw an amazing spike in the registrations count. We would definitely suggest having some last moment boom, which will grab all the attention, but make sure to spread it as much as you can over all the social media platforms.
Design NXT Event
In the inaugural talk by Shivraj Sabale- Globant India TDC head, we introduced a brand new Instagram filter, with the DesignNXT logo. This was then followed by a very interesting session by Gabriela Moirano who spoke about Augmented Design and Challenges Moving Forward. At this moment, when there is so much information regarding AI and the implications it will have on our work, should we start rethinking our Design Practice? Anirudh Natuu spoke about Speculative Design — A Tool for Visualization.The talk focused mainly on the speculative design framework and how design professionals could leverage that moving forward in various areas including professional fields, scientific areas, and technological imaginations. Camilo Jones spoke about Wowing Your Customers — An XD DemoShowcasing the capabilities of Adobe XD and how it is becoming the big fish in the UX design industry. This was then followed by a session by Parhsuram Korade on Power of Illustration in Conversation Design Craft to build an appropriate character for your conversational UI using conversational design to increase the user engagement towards your brand.
The next day also was interesting when we had Kasturi Shinde speak about Zero UI and the Future of Interfaces Traveling into the world of voice, movement, VR, and beyond, this talk will deliberate on some futuristic innovations.Anuradha Shejul speaking about The World Through Different Eyes . A session focused on accessibility followed by Amit Dubey exhibiting some of his UI magic in the session Natural UIs. Are We There Yet? showcasing Globant’s pathbreaking work on making NUIs accessible to everyone, especially on AI in the browser. Pankaj Khamitkar from the design team wooed everyone with Past & Future of Immersive Experience — AR/VR and spoke about how immersive experiences have become an integral part of our life and how the digital world is taking it to the next level with emerging technologies. The day was then complimented by two workshops one on Design Brain Teaser by Roshan Pawar design and an Extending Brand Identity by Deepashree Kale.
So it was an interesting mix of the past, the present, and the future blended through the fabric of design, technology, and extended reality. Lots of take away from these sessions.
DesignNxt2020 had highlights, and those highlights are worth reliving and Kept alive even after the event has passed. To make this happen we created Event Branding and Styling templates so it can be shared through — Event Badges, Zoom Backgrounds, Slide Decks etc.
Positive Takeaways -
To keep the conversation going and showcasing the value of The Globant India — DesignNxt2020 we thought of creating the slide decks from the talks/activities and interactive sessions. This allows us to review not only the sessions everyone attended, but also what everyone has to comment/suggest, big ideas shared, takeaways, and Clarify(Q&A), adding value to the overall experience.
Post Event Networking — Track and Measure
Tracking and measuring the ROI on the event is indeed very important to measure the success of any event. During these COVID19 situations when the whole world is moved Online, it will be faster to measure the result in case we want to scale up or improve on the experience. Working with event numbers and plotting event Data metrics would help us for our next event. Following is the data to track and measure to give us actionable insights -
CONCLUSION
Digital Events though are perceived to be a simple task are equally challenging and complex. It’s a success of great teamwork, precise planning, and execution. The success of it can be measured through the multiple touchpoints it can have which are engaging and are of greater interest to the audience. Right Subject, great speaker line up, and timing is the secret sauce behind making these online conferences a great success.
