BuzzIt MVP

How we used UX design to help organisations have better events with more interactions leading to worthwhile connections.

Lead UX Designer

2 months

Adobe XD, Miro, Trello, Invision

Project Overview

Vancouver has over 500 events a week, but even with that huge amount most people were not happy with the connections they made during an event. My challenge was to help organisers to make their events more interactive in order to improve the overall event experience for the attendees and give them tools to enhance their way of connecting to relevant people.
How to help attendees make meaningful connections while making the events better for their organisers?

Goals

Attendees / User Goals

Meet more people during events
Have the event information available even after the event is over

Organizers / Business Goals

Have more recurring attendees
Improve the quality of their events

About BuzzIt

BuzzIt is a Vancouver based startup that aims to enhance engagement in events through a webapp. I had just joined the team as they had just switched from being an app to becoming a webapp and from B2C to a B2B strategy. All they had when I joined was the conversation app that was pivoting to a more complex product that tries to encapsulate more of the event experience.

The Problem:

Events are a big part of an entrepreneur's life, it’s a great place to meet like minded people in your area facing the same problems or even better, that solved a problem that you are facing currently. But most of the time when you go to events you spend 90% of your time sitting down listening to the people that are presenting without any interaction whatsoever.

Audiences barely interact with each other

And even when you are the one on the stage you don’t get the chance to hear people’s feedback unless they stay till the end of the event to chat. What happens to those missed conversations? And what if you are way more interested in the connections and not in the presentations itself? Normally you would have to wait hours until you could start your first conversation, and on good days you have enough time after the event is over to talk to five, six people. Those are the reasons that BuzzIt was created.

‍The challenge was to build the first version of the app with the main features: Voting, Presenters, Sponsors and Chat.

Research

Since we are coming from a pivot on the product, there was a need to understand the audience regarding the new perspective the product was going.
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Field Study

First step was understanding the event space. We were interested in hearing people’s motivations, their thoughts regarding events in the area and how they used their mobile phone during events. One of the main issues regarding our app is that it could distract the audience from the presentation, causing the managers to choose not to buy our app in the future.
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Several business events were attended to understand how attendees behave

Key Insights

As it turns out the audience was already distracted by other means, so we used this as a selling point:

“The audience is already constantly checking out their phones during the event, why not give them something related to it to think about?”
Another finding of the field study is how fast paced events are, so the user needs to have as few choices as possible to make while using our app. Any confusion and the user would just give up and focus on the event.

User Interviews

To identify the problems the attendees were facing during the events we interviewed them after the events were over. The questions were about how many events they attended monthly, what was their goal and if that goal was achieved. We wanted to have a general idea on the user needs and how they were addressing those needs currently.
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Key Insights

Users attended way more events than we thought: Some people attended 2 events a week.
Their main goal was to make connections to help them in business.
They felt like they didn’t reach that goal that often and that’s why they went to as many events as they could to get lucky in some.
There was widespread dissatisfaction with the amount of connections made.
There was also dissatisfaction regarding the type of connections made. People were looking for specific industries and specific roles and sometimes left without finding any.

Intreviews were made after the events

Persona

Initially we discovered two personas: Students and Startup Entrepreneurs.

Steven is our most common case

But Jessica benefits more from BuzzIt and has more to add to conversations

User Flow

User flow helped us to organise the many ideas that we had into an organised flow that made sense for us and the user.

We used the user flow to organize where the page is, what are the priorities for the app to work and next to build

Prototype

The prototype had the initial concept of the app. We had chat, voting, presenters, audience and sponsor pages. We also made improvements to the homescreen to test some concepts.
The goal was to have a solid 1.0 version ready to deploy with as minimum as possible to make the development fast, but at the same time acompassing the needs of the basic event and attendee.

The main challenge with the prototype was to make the navigation and usability make sense in a browser. That means that I had some restraints such as not being able to use native functions of Android or IOs, less screen space (the URL bar of the browser takes space, and on android the navigation buttons are always showing), I could only use icons from font libraries (not custom) and I had to follow material design guidelines.
All of the constraints had the goal to speed up the develop process and make the design > build cycle faster. With the prototype and a couple scenarios ready, we set in motion user testing.

A display of some of the screens after weeks of wireframing and testing

User Tests

We had four rounds of tests with 5 people each round and a survey after the test was done. Our two main questions were:
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“What is the part of the app that the users are going to value the most?”
‍“Will they understand the flow?”
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The part that we assumed was going to draw the most attention was the event group chat, it turned out that the audience was more interested in the presenter profiles, the chat coming in second place. We came up with two different flows for this test, one starting in the event details and other starting already inside the event group chat. The flow that was easier for the user to understand our app was the audience details one.

The audience enjoyed the presenter profile the most and event chat second

The tests also showed that having a navbar below helped immensely the users to go through the app with speed and ease.
Some labels were changed, we had some UI improvements, changing icons to be more recognizable with the labels is an example as well as adjusting some hierarchy and positioning of elements.
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Important Quotes

When I'm at an event I want to connect to the relevant speakers, and it's always a pain because I have to take pictures of their linkedin slide (when there is one)

I really like the group chat. I cosider myself an introvert, so having a group chat that I can talk to someone to break the ice first will help me out a lot

I really like profiles, I wonder if I can access them after the event is over to connect with the people that I talked with

As an organizer I worry about chat moderation from my part. It's not usual, but sometimes you get hecklers in events, and if they are anonymous they will take away from the event for sure.

Handoff

After the weekly tests were done and reviewed we decided which screens / flows needed a redo and another round of testing and which ones were ready for dev.
The screens that were ready for dev were tagged on miro and sent to trello for the dev team to get started.
This is the anatomy of the trello cards to help the dev team nail it:
All the pages are in different cards, each with a checklist with all the different interactions explained and the backend logic behind them.

All the pages in different cards, each with the design in a screenshot
All the interactions explained with the backend logic inside a checklist
An explainer video to show the animations and how the interactions work live
A kanban system so the design team is tagged again to review after the dev team is done

What's next?

Analyse how the version performed, continue to build new features to go on top of the app
Keep an eye for small and fast improvements that can make a difference in the short term while testing new features to add to the pipeline so we improve while always keeping an eye on the future
Continue making the discovery process to find out what is the next big feature to be built while making improvements to the current version