Web Summit companion app

New schedule design

The Web Summit events (Web Summit Lisbon, Web Summit Rio, Web Summit Qatar, Collision Toronto, and Rise Hong Kong) have a companion app that helps attendees to schedule their days and makes meaningful connections.
As the UX researcher and UX designer, I have studied the attendee's behavior while using the app and recommended some improvements to the schedule area.

Problem

Attendees looking to learn or get inspired at the event mentioned having issues with the scheduler all along their journey.

Pre-event

They say that it was hard to understand Web Summit's jargon and to decide which sessions, from the plethora list, to add to their schedule without answers to the questions they have:

what do "Tracks" or "Curated Tracks" mean?
Where can they find the full schedule organized by day and time?
Is there any overlap between the selected sessions?
Are any of the sessions streamed?
If they missed a session will video on demand will be available?
what is the distance between the stages? Do they have time to reach another stage before the session starts?
How can attendees quickly search for a session they heard about?

During the event

A mix of emotions (excitement, hype, fear of missing out (FOMO), anxiety, tiredness, etc) and the event hubbub trigger stress, analysis paralysis, and slow decision-making. Attendees are screaming for guidance and help:

Where is the attendee's personal agenda?
How do I go from point A to point B?
what is "Live" around them?
what is next?
What is streamed?
what will be available on video on demand?
what should they not miss out on?

Goal

Learn as much as possible during this small gap of time when attendees are actively using the companion app.
Analyze the data and propose recommendations to fix the Schedule journey.

Solution

As attendees only use the app for a few days, they are looking for known patterns and taxonomy.

Remove the wall of the tracks' icons that was the default screen.
Immediately present the full schedule organized by day and time
Simplify the taxonomy by getting rid of the Company jargon and using common keywords.
Offer quick access to the attendee's personal agenda.
Properly identify what is Now and Next.
Provide information on what will be streamed or Video on demand with quick access to these features.

A beta version has been tested by the staff during our last event and should be available to all attendees during our upcoming event.

Tools

Miro
Figma
Typeform survey
Companion app chat feature
Matoma

Team

1 UX researcher/designer
1 Product designer
4 developers
1 project manager

My Role

UX design
UX research
QA

Timeline

Overall: 4+ weeks
Discovery & Research: 2+ weeks
Design & testing: 2 weeks

My Design Process

Insights extraction of the attendees' interviews.

Interviews

The week before the event I contacted more than 300 attendees using the companion app chat feature. The open-ended questions script was taking into account if the attendee was a returning or first-timer person.
28 attendees fully collaborated and 15 others partially answered the questions. The data help to build a new set of personas with realistic motivation, pre-event behavior, pain points, delightful moments, and quotes.

UMUX-lite and SUS results with graphic of repartition of the answers.

Surveys

During the event at the end of the day, a survey module was presented on the companion app home page. Four questions were asked of the attendees:

Does the app meet your needs?
Is the app easy to use?
What are the features you are using the most?
What can we improve?

We received 612 answers (2.4% answers rate) which helped us to calculate System Usability Scale (SUS) via the Usability Metric User Experience lite (UMUX-lite).

The survey shows a downward trend in the app usability due to the complexity to use of the most used feature: The Scheduler

Personas

Most of the decisions were based on assumptions or marketing points of view. To implement the user center design methodology, we needed to create personas with the aim to form a deeper understanding of our users' goals, needs, experiences, and behaviors. 5 personas based on the attendees' goals instead of marketing ticket segments. They were based on user interviews and surveys, and we kept updating them throughout the project as we gathered more data. We also assigned diverse level disabilities to the personas to make sure that accessibility is taken into account throughout the entire project.

Schedule - view "During event"

Wireframes

Using Figma, a low-fidelity wireframe translates in a single view all the sketches done to define the different sections of the new Schedule page (pre-event and during-event states). Copie was discussed with the content and copy team and the UI team was in charge to produce a high-fidelity prototype that we later test during a Guerilla usability test.

Schedule Beta version

App 1st dev iteration beta testing

As the development of the 1st version was ready before an event, we decided to allow staff to download it and run a beta testing with real live data

Before and after

Hight fidelity mock of the schedule in the during mode

Learnings

Doing interviews via chat was a first for me and I was really happy that attendees received me so well. Including accessibility from the beginning in the personas help the team to build more empathy toward attendees.