How I designed the UX for a 1500+ person tech conference in just 2 months
There are several key elements to making a conference successful. The most obvious one is having great speakers and sessions. Another is having excellent logistics and operations. But there is one factor that is often hidden — the overall design and visual experience.
As the Lead UX Designer at Leap and of COMPASS, I wanted to share a closer look at the design process that went on behind the scenes to put together a successful 1500+ person conference in just 2 months! The timeline was definitely challenging, to say the least, but with the help of awesome volunteers, we managed to pull off an event that I’m proud of.
Here’s a breakdown of the timeline and process starting from the beginning months of the planning stages to the final weeks before the event.
2 Months Before The Event
- Thinking through the overall theme we want users to have/feel
- Creating the logos, choosing the event colors, and selecting volunteers
Initial Research and Brainstorm
We wanted to present a memorable brand that appeared professional, approachable, and exciting. The word COMPASS was chosen to represent providing a sense of direction for one’s career. More specifically, it stood for:
“COMmunicate and PASS on career insights.”
We wanted to use word mark as the logo type. From there, we searched various events that we really liked and went through a series of moodboards to capture what we wanted the audience to feel from the event.
Choosing colors
At the same time, we also narrowed down the fonts and color combinations that we were interested in. We wanted to bring energy to the conference, so a combination of a more professional & mature navy blue color and a more energetic red/orange color were our final choices. This combination of warm and cool colors brought the right amount of contrast. We also introduced green to represent growth.
The following pictures showed the various options that we were deciding on:
Creating the Logo
There were 4 logo concepts that I presented to the team. The first concept focused on the meaning of “coming toward”; the second focused on the meaning of “path” (hence, the gaps between letters can be connected); the third focused on dynamic movement and the word “passing”; and the 4th emphasized “compass”, as its literal meaning. The team unanimously decided to move forward with #2.
Once we decided on a logo concept, I then started making some small adjustments. You can see below the variety of cuts for the C and S that we tried before finally choosing one.
From there, we made a simple brand guide for COMPASS 2018, defining what alternative logos we may need for different backgrounds and under what context.
1 Month Before The Event
- Creating the website and Eventbrite page
- Organizing the agenda & speaker info
Creating the website & Eventbrite page
Once we chose the logos and colors, I had to move quickly to create the website images. We decided to use Wix as our conference website host because that didn’t require any engineering effort if we wanted to make any changes. We created an Eventbrite page for ticket distribution and needed to consistently keep this up to date with our website content. However, updating both Wix and Eventbrite content was a painful process (which included daily changes and updates) since I was the only person responsible for exporting all the images & speaker content.
3 Weeks Before The Event
- Design the posters, badges and T-shirts
- Design the welcome screen, roll up stands, and letter sorting stands
- Design the photo wall, speaker wall, check-in backdrop
After creating the logo, brand guide and website, we moved forward with specific item designs: badges, banner stands, T-Shirt and posters, etc.
This was the busiest design phase because there was a tight deadline for sending all the designs into print shops. Badges needs to be sent in 3 weeks before while the T-shirts, roll up stands and larger pieces needed to be sent in 2 weeks before, and the brochures needed to be sent in 1 week before the event.
The volunteers were incredibly helpful during this phase. We had several great UX volunteers who all contributed their ideas: Chloe Du, Di Chang, Tan Ma,Tori Zhao and Yunyi Zhang.
Here are some highlights from their work:
Unifying the Visual System
We had chosen one of the volunteers’ concept on gradient and arrows as our overall visual style. I then needed to unify the colors and simplify thevisual elements to create a clear hierarchical system.
One of the most important factors that contributed to the visual experience for Compass was the visual system. Our colors not only represented the primary colors, but also had a good balance of cool and warm colors which created a good contrast.
With 4 major colors and a variety of visual elements to work with, it’s very easy to fall into a sense chaos and disorder without careful planning. Throughout the process, we kept emphasizing navy blue as the major color, red as the secondary color and yellow and green are both highlight colors. Regardless of what we had to design, the hierarchical structure would stay the same.
1 Week Before The Event
- Painting the photo booth props
- Finalizing brochures to print
- Creating the master slides
The last two weeks turned out to be the busiest in terms of design needs. Not only were there always tweaks and changes to different design files when communicating with vendors and print shops, but I also had to constantly update multiple platforms (website, Eventbrite, brochure, slides) as we were finalizing the schedule, agenda, and speakers.
We also wanted to have a fun experience during the event so we asked volunteers to help customize our photo booth with props.
Day of the Event
Overall, the COMPASS experience went really smoothly from the speakers to attendees, from the staff to volunteers.
Many factors contributed to a successful event: our leaders’ impact and wide connections, detailed planning from Leap and vendors, community engagement that drove sign ups, highly motivated volunteers, etc.
Many people also gave positive feedback about the overall design, which is why I decided to put together this article to share some of my experiences and process designing for this conference.
Post Event Reflection
- Be more thoughtful about all users
- Be more strategic about organizing content
- Plan design items at an earlier stage
I really enjoyed this project from beginning to end despite the tight timeline and schedule. A lot of energy was spent designing a variety of items, thus there was less time to think about the experience from the perspective of different user groups. I realized later that the volunteers’ names on the brochures weren’t sorted and that might’ve brought confusion as to why we sorted by contribution levels.
In terms of content, what I learned is that no one should be the only person in charge of things that need constant updates, e.g. website. Though it’s a lot more effort to code the website from scratch, being the only person who can produce image and content for the website as well as managing the website made it extra hard for quick content updates.
Another thing that consumed a lot of energy and time were the new items that we kept adding to our design list during the last month. It is understandable since we were creating a huge event first time and wanted to deliver a stellar experience. However, next time, I would try to identify specific design items with teammates much earlier on so we could leave more time for final checks and sample printings.
This is what I’ve learned designing for the Compass 2018 conference. I hope this can help UX designers and their teams plan for similar events in the future! :)
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