Digital event solutions
Evia
For several years Evia has been providing a wide range of services to the world of events. Some of the world’s leading organizations rely on Evia for creating a successful engaging virtual event experience for their attendees.
CLIENT /
Microsoft, AWS, Tableau, Starbucks, TedX.
USERS /
Event Planners, Collaborators, Audience.
ROLE /
Product Management, UI/UX Lead, Visual Design.
WEBSITE /
Evia Ground
Is a team of seasoned professionals who support each event from planning, capturing content to wrap-up.
Evia Cloud
Is a platform that allows users to host all their event content in one place, allowing their audiences to engage with their event from anywhere.
Evia Custom
Is a customized service that provides the clients with an independent platform designed with innovative solutions to fit their needs.
Why Evia Cloud
While collaborating with a wide range of clients Evia discovered their pain points and following difficulties:
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It’s expensive and resource intensive for the organizations to build a custom site for every event.
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Organizations need to hire professionals to create and host an independent customized platform.
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Organizing travel and stay for all the attendees to attend an event on-site is expensive and tedious.
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Attendees who can’t make it to the event on-site miss out on very important content.
What is Evia Cloud
Evia Cloud, a design of an immersive digital event hosting platform that offers the following:
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A cost-effective solution for event owners that immerses attendees in an experience that is interactive, professional and easy-to-use.
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A single platform that provides users (non-expert) an ability to create, customize, collaborate, analyze and host their event with a few simple steps.
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Reduces the burden of organizing travel and stay by providing a virtual event solution.
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Provides attendees a medium to view content from anywhere at any time.
How is a virtual event executed
A high-level visual representation of Evia Cloud's role in what it takes to make an event virtual.
Evia Cloud, design of a go-to digital event solution.
CURRENT - Session Page
NEW - Session Page Design with Cognitive Services
CURRENT - Session Page
NEW - Session Page Design with Cognitive Services
My Responsibilities
As a Sr. UX Designer and a Product Manager (beginner) I wore two hats I:
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Delivered comprehensive UI/UX solutions.
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Presented complex concepts clearly and persuasively across varying levels of the organization.
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Partnered with the development team to drive shared vision and execution of product plans (priorities, user stories, backlog)
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Conducted regular usability testing, created rapid prototypes to validate design concepts with stakeholders and customers.
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Collaborated with marketing and sales to build and execute go-to-market plans.
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Created, prioritized and managed a user story roadmap aligned with timely releases.
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Participated in competitor analysis and incorporated findings and best practices into upcoming releases.
Client presentations and user testing sessions
Research | How I got there
I got involved with the product immediately after its first release in the marketplace.
In order to proceed and to support the sale, it was essential to find out the user response to the first launch.
I consulted with stakeholders and other team members to understand the current design, customer needs and challenges.
We conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing platform with 30 participants. Our goal was to understand the challenges and the workarounds they employed.
We divided testing sessions into two stages:
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STAGE I – using the current functionality within the platform to create event pages.
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STAGE II – determine what needs to be developed in the product to allow for the best user experience, functionality, and long-term user satisfaction.
EVIA CLOUD, FIRST RELEASE - CURRENT Pages
CURRENT - Homepage
CURRENT - Navigation
CURRENT - Edit Session Page
CURRENT - Session Details Page
CURRENT - Analytics Page
Being a new addition to the team I took the advantage of wearing the user hat and reviewing the platform from a layman point of view with no preconceived notions and biases.
I started by creating a sitemap of the entire application and identified possible dead ends, loopholes, redundancies, and complexities. I also verified them with our user group to see how many faced similar issues.
It appeared that certain tasks can be simplified if we made some changes to the information architecture.
Although there was a big scope for improvement, the goal was not to start from scratch and drastically change the entire application but to lead into it step by step by making simple updates to enhance the user experience of the platform without delaying the releases and keeping in mind the existing user’s understanding of the system.
SITEMAP
Problems
Based on our survey and user testing feedback:
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The homepage looked dull and did not motivate a new client to proactively sign up for the platform.
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The platform failed to make a good first impression. The interface looked overwhelming, visually offputting, dated, and took precedence over the client’s content.
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Lack of guidelines and directions created obstacles and frustration in accomplishing the task.
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Users struggled in navigating across the platform and faced difficulties in getting started.
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Insufficient features, lack of flexibility made the platform experience very rigid.
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Session pages offered a mundane approach to viewing content which lead to boredom, distraction and lack of willingness to watch the content ultimately leading to less traffic/viewer count.
Solutions
In order to boost our sale with a successful update we:
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Introduced a landing page providing product summary using marketing and benefits language to encourage a new visitor to sign up and explore the platform.
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Designed a simpler yet trendy interface with the visual hierarchy to draw attention to content and important actions.
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Created how-to guides providing clear instructions to non-experts on how to use certain features and functionalities.
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Reorganized the navigation elements and made the important call to actions more discernible to eliminate discovery time.
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Introduced various feature modifications and designed new modules which cater to the varied user needs
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Events are meant to be inspiring, fun and lively. Incorporated cognitive services and designed a new UI to bring in an innovative approach to content consumption.
User Pain Points
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Clients had varied needs of privacy settings and gated content. The Privacy Settings feature did not cater to a large spectrum of those scenarios.
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They were unable to add/edit Sessions without media files.
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The platform did not offer a medium to manage the collaborators who worked on the event pages.
LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES
Coming up with new Navigation options
Initial stage sketches for new Features and Functionalities
Wireframes
New Features & Functionalities
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Conceptualized a Custom Private Settings feature that allowed semi-gated content.
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Designed a new Sessions UI to separate the Metadata and Media Import Functionality.
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Designed a user management module for easy collaboration between the members of the organization.
MEDIUM FIDELITY WIREFRAMES
Aligning Libraries with Events and its Sessions on Event Dashboard Page
Separating metadata and improving the media import functionalitiey
Customizing Session Thumbnails to suit various scenarios
Panel navigation and Event Details page design
One step action to Edit Functionality
Incorporating User Management feature
Navigation Prototype for user testing
Edit Functionality A/B testing prototype
User Pain Points
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Content consumption lacked direct engagement.
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There was no way for the audience to filter, find, recall or quickly get to a point that was most relevant or interesting to them which lead to lethargy, distraction and lack of willingness to stay tuned for the entire video.
Incorporating Cognitive Services in Evia Cloud
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To establish Evia Cloud in the industry as a competitive product in the marketplace we stayed abreast of UX trends and looked for creative ideas and inspiration in parallel analogous worlds.
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We dedicated ourselves to integrating industry’s most comprehensive video AI services and carefully customizing those solutions to suit our platform and enhance its usability.
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We studied how these features would help users unlock insights from any video by enabling them to search on faces that appeared, spoken audio that is transcribed and translated, keywords and even emotions that are expressed.
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These insights would help improve the content discovery experience, therefore, increasing user engagement during content consumption in Evia Cloud and other custom platforms.
New feature list
LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES - Customizing Cognitive Services for Evia Cloud
Sketching ideas to implement Cognitive Services on Session page
Visual Design
Gathering from the feedback it became essential to provide a new skin to the platform. The first impression depended on many factors such as structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more. With the right use of visual elements, I tried to strike a good balance between the interface and the actual content.
Going by the tagline “CONTENT TO PEOPLE” I presented 3 visual concepts.
The idea behind the new design was to make it appear simple, appealing, trendy and primarily give enough limelight to the content. Letting the audience focus and be drawn into the content and yet be encouraged to interact with it.
Adding Cognitive Services features like Keywords, Speaker Indexer, Transcript and Translation to Evia Cloud Session Page Design
Video plays from the point where the selected Keywords are spoken in the video
Number of times the keyword appeared in the video
Video plays from the point of selected Transcript in the video
Video plays from the point where the selected Speaker appears in the video
Video plays from the point of selected timestamp in the video
Amount of selected speaker's appearance in the video
Options to change the Language and Search within the Transcript
These features would help the user in discovering and accessing important and relevant elements of the video
CURRENT - Session Page Design
NEW - Session Page Design with Cognitive Services
CURRENT - Event Dashboard
NEW - Event Dashboard
CURRENT - Event Page
NEW - Event Page
CURRENT - Design Page
NEW - Design Page
Evia Custom
TIMELINE / 1 week
Problems
As per the client feedback:
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The earlier platform lacked an element of interest both visually and interactively.
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The platform failed to demonstrate client’s inclination to showcase “who they are” and make the experience of watching the content enjoyable.
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Attendees struggled in finding relevant content as the platform addressed a large range of topics.
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Fewer attendees consumed the content online as well as not many attended the event in person.
Solutions
In our design pitch we proposed the following:
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An innovative approach to content viewing through data visualization styles.
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An overall unique, engaging and Tableau-centric user-experience that connects the audience to the brand.
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Ideas to present content in a personalized manner for each attendee to eliminate them feeling overwhelmed.
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Ideas to generate a sense of FOMO that will increase the number of first-time attendees each year both online as well as on-site.
Tableau Conference, design of a digital event experience.
OLD - Video Page
NEW - Video Page - Designed Cognitive Services in data visualization style
Ideation & Wireframes
Keeping the Tableau Conference 18 goals in mind our team collaborated to propose new strategy and solutions in order to revamp their old experience.
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As per the requirement, we made use of their style guide and placed emphasis on making the user experience more engaging and novel.
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We started with brainstorming ideas that would most creatively demonstrate how Tableau’s platform can be more innovative and inspiring especially when it comes to DATA!
LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES - Exploring Data Visual styles
A quantitative research infographic on how virtual experiences help address FOMO
Visual Design
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We incorporated our ideas into various data visualizations, animations, transitions and made changes to the information architectures to effectively deliver the content and to create A WOW! moment for the attendees.
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Each data visualization was meaningfully designed to express various information at different stages which would help attendees to spot the most relevant content and keep them hooked to the event.
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The idea was to make every attendee feel important with a personalized view and to create a sense of FOMO & credit them at the end of their experience. Thereby leading to more viewer engagement.
Bar Graph Tile Hover State
Bar Graph Button Hover State
Bubble Graph Filter Hover State
Bar Graph Page Transitions
OLD - Landing Page
NEW - Landing Page
‘Personalized Dashboard’
Starting with the most exciting element on this page the Bubble Graph of Tracks, sized as per the relevance of interest and professional background of the user
OLD - Video Library Page
NEW - Video Library Page
Video thumbnail bar graphs sized and organized as per ratings/views
NEW - Speakers Page
Speaker thumbnail bar graphs sized as per number of videos
NEW - Keynote Landing Page
To create a sense of FOMO the landing page will showcase a gallery of live pictures/videos of various happenings on-site with a thread of very unique interesting questions that would be answered during the keynote to encourage the online viewers to stay tuned as they wait for the keynote to start.
