Basic overview: The events / conferences at Harvard leave both the organizers and attendees longing for more. The attendees often suffer from lack of needed information and are usually given loads of documents to read. From the organizers perspective it is a logistical nightmare as volunteers don’t turn up last minute. I want to design a simple experience where attendees can be provided with maximum experience with limited during conference workload on organizers.

Understanding Process: I attended the Social Enterprise Conference at HBS/HKS on 29th / 30th March 2014. There are multiple panels going on in parallel with hundreds of international attendees.  I participated as a volunteer and used the opportunity to interview 3 members of organizing leadership team and 3 attendees. Apart from interviews, I also observed the challenges being faced by attendees and organizers.

Identify a problem or interest area

  • Problem:
  • Due to overload of information and sometimes lack of correct information, I have found it difficult to have complete experience of conferences. How can I make a simple mobile app to provide basic information
  • Goals
  • Finding up-to-date information relevant to attendees
  • Timely announcements
  • Better platform for networking

Population

  • Mainly the students and youth who attend conferences

Reframe problem

  • How can a complete experience be delivered to conference attendees? 

Broad Questions:

  • Organizers:
  • Do you have previous experience in organizing events / conferences?
  • Why did you organize this one? / were part of the organizing team?
  • How did you get selected?
  • How much time did it take from your normal academic exercise?
  • Do you think it’s worth it?
  • What did you try to do different from your previous experiences? Examples?
  • If you were an attendees what would be most important to you? Examples?
  • What challenges did you face this time? Internal (within team)? External?
  • How would you rate this conference so far? How could it have been improved?

Attendees:

  • What brings you to this conference?
  • Why do you go to such conferences?
  • Which sessions did you enjoy?
  • How different is it from watching videos on Youtube?
  • So far, do you think you got value for your money?
  • What did you like? Examples?
  • What could have been better? Examples?
  • Did you get opportunity to network? / Are you interested in networking?

 

Results:  

  • Organizers – key challenges
    • Last minute volunteer dropouts
    • Last minute updates
  • Attendees – key challenges
    • Unable to network which was the main objective to buy ticket
    • Got lost in buildings for finding rooms
    • In shor allow people to CREATE STORIES
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