Venturing into unfamiliar territory is something we all must do from time to time. Sometimes we travel for work to build new relationships with clients, and other times it's for fun to discover something new. Every once in a while it's a bit of both, that's where Interaction20 lives.

Working as a team of two, my partner and I were challenged to design an app for IXDAs upcoming 2020 conference in Milan, Italy. We were given two weeks to do everything from research to delivering a prototype of our design solution.

My main duties were: UI Design , Researcher , and Information Archtect ,

I was also involved in: , I was also involved in: User Interviews, Ideation, Usability Testing, and Prototyping

Duration:

2 weeks

Build a mobile application
For Interaction20 attendees
To help attendees navigate the conference
And Improve their overall experience at Interaction20

The first challenge in this project was to determine the scope. What do we want to build? To do this we started with research.

We started with competitive research by looking at what other large events spanning mutiple days and venues offered to help their attendees navigate their experience. The goal was to give the team an idea of what is expected as well as see what other products have done well, and what caused disappointment.

That there was a wide range of depth of the information that other products offered to the people attending their events. We saw a few similarities between them like schedules , maps , and speakers , but there were many other features we were curious about. We decided we needed to narrow our focus for this project. To do that we needed to talk to people who attend these sorts of events.

Luckily we live in Austin, a city that hosts conferences and festivals weekly, which meant we had no shortage of people to interview. To begin to get an idea of what people need while attending a conference we started talking to people who go to conferences for work and festivals for fun. In our interviews we wanted to know what people had to say about their own experiences at these events. Our goal was to find commonalities between people's experiences and connect the dots to draw insights about what our focus features should be while building our product.

We got the opportunity to sit down and have conversations with seven people individually. Once the team reconvened we analyzed our notes and broke down the interviews into short statements , insights , wants , and needs written down on sticky notes. We began building affinity maps from these ideas to show us what themes bubbled up and became directions to explore.

Mia needs a way to schedule her time at Interaction20 in Milan because she wants to feel organized and confident navigating an unfamiliar city.

We believe that by designing an app that allows IxDA members to schedule and customize their plans, we will enable attendees to get the most out of their Interaction20 experience.

After compiling our user research and proposed user flow data we were ready to identify our minimum viable product features and start ideating on our solution. To do this we used the MOSCOW method and a 2 by 2 matrix to identify areas we thought would have the most impact.

Our research was showing us that the main reasons people pulled out their phones and opened the app were to look at their schedules to find out when things started and to view the map to find out where things were located.

1. Log in and registration
2. Scheduling
3. Map

After doing a sketch studio to get some ideas out and building wireframes we began the process of user testing , feedback , and iteration . We gave the users the tasks we created and the tests showed us where users were finding sticking points in our design. After testing and refinement we created our final prototype.

I think overall the solution that our team came up with was well executed. The largest challenge we faced was the volume of work we wanted to accomplish between the two of us.

This project was all about navigating unfamiliar territory and that came through in every aspect of the project. We were navigating working collaboratively to build a product that would be useful to our users. The Solution we came up with was also all about navigation with a map as our navigation through space and schedule to navigate through time.