Applying Product Design to a Conference
What happens when two designers, who have never personally attended a conference before, are tasked with designing an immersive conference? One of the most challenging projects Button’s Design team has tackled, emerges. With no experience attending conferences, we viewed this challenge as an opportunity to apply product design thinking to an event.
The event was TAP Conference, a mobile commerce conference presented by Button. We saw it as an opportunity to educate and involve the tech industry in innovations in mobile commerce.
Similar to how our Design team approaches building new products, when designing the conference we kept the user’s experience at the forefront. During the walk-through of the convention space, our Design team quickly identified a narrative that would reward the conference attendees. This included recognizing various points in the space when guests would be engaging in different activities, such as arrival and networking.
The Brand
As the purpose of the conference was to exchange ideas, challenges, and successes in mobile commerce, and it was essential to recognize the community-driven aspect of the event.
Due to this, our Design team decided to use multiple colors in the logo. This was incredibly important to the overall experience. For example, if the final logo color had been blue, it could have seemed as if Ticketmaster was the most dominating the conference and outshining the other companies. We wanted to ensure that the logo referenced a unity of opinions and ideas. By using multiple colors that overlap and create new shades, the logo communicates the conference’s mission, to share and exchange learnings on mobile commerce.
The second necessary characteristic of the brand was to reference the conference’s connection to mobile apps. Participating companies in TAP were either investing and working directly in mobile commerce and had customer-facing applications. Companies communicate their identity to customers through the application icon and thus, TAP’s branding would need to reference the application icon as well.
We also wanted to include transparency as an element of TAP Conference’s branding, as it’s a defining principle of Button’s design language. Button uses the visual element of transparency to reference the functionality of our product which lives between applications and appears to be a native feature.
Looking back now, we’ve recognized that the biggest weakness in the branding is the logo in black and white. Unfortunately, the transparency tends to be too light when in all white, losing the feeling of unity.We tried outlining the mark in white but found that the mark loses all of its meaning around apps and mobile. When we begin to plan the next TAP Conference, our Design team will need to revisit this challenge.
Posters
Throughout the venue space were opportunities to use posters as wayfinding signage, sponsor advertisements, and to communicate speaker and panelist information. By identifying early on which mentalities the users would be in, at various stages and places, the process of creating the assembly of posters was straightforward. These user mindsets allowed us to designating various spaces around the venue to a type of poster. For example, when the user is outside of the building and entering the conference, we can assume the typical user is thinking “Am I at the right place?” or “Is this the correct entrance?” Therefore to solve this problem the poster had to communicate the appropriate information.
We did this by following the KISS principle, “keep it simple, stupid.” The simplest answer is to use big, bold, and bright visuals to grab the user’s attention whether they are traveling from across the street or down the block.
After planning out the attack, we turned our attention to applying the branding on posters in a way that would work at all sizes (our largest poster being 52 feet long and 8 feet tall). We drew upon the metaphor of the app icon to unify the print visuals. The playfulness of the logo and its ability to create multiple colors through layering enabled us to differentiate various “groups” of posters that reflected the various mindsets an attendee might have at a given moment.
As our Design team experienced at TAP Conference, approaching a problem with a user’s experience top of mind, leads to a swifter and less haphazard design process. We shaped the design of the poster series to complement the user experience at various stages in the attendee experience. Our process, rooted in product design, enabled two novices to design a conference experience embracing and injecting the spirit and values of Button into a new brand, TAP Conference.
Special thanks to Patrick Lewis my fellow designer and editor, New World Stages, and the entire Button team for putting on this amazing conference!
