project: event site

Speaker Page

Project brief

A page to view what speakers are speaking at the event.

Requirements

Must show details about speaker including name, job title, company & and speaker bio. Must use existing database of speaker images. Speaker images are generally pretty low quality and taken from LinkedIn.

Links

Calendar
Pick an event and view speakers page
(the further into the future an event the less likely there will be an current speakers).

Old Speaker Page

The first thing I did was look at the original site and define any issues or any improvements. The original design displays only the company logo, Im guessing that this is done because it was thought that the company that the speaker belongs to is the biggest draw for attendees so promoting the company over the person was the way to go, I feel that just displaying a logo is impersonal and doesn’t immediately say speaker.

Original Speaker Page

The original speaker page consists of a grid of logos with the company name and job title below

Original Speaker Modal

The speaker photo is revealed in the speaker modal

Speaker Card Vs Sponsor Card

The speakers and sponsors have very similar cards, The speaker card resembles a sponsor card as they are both logo's in a white box.


Logos Sizes

There seems to be quite a big difference in the size of some logo's compared to other logo's, If the logo footprint is equal on all sides it will take the maximum amount of room possible, however if the logo's footprint is a rectangle wont be able to .

Logo sizes are not even

I think the logo frame being a sqaure favours logos that have a square footprint.

Identifying problem Areas
  • Speaker cards look like sponsor cards
  • The speaker name isnt displayed until the modal opens up
  • The speaker photo isnt displayed until the modal opens up
  • The Logo’s uploaded arent evenly sized

Solutions

Defining the Speaker Card

The speaker card needs to represent a speaker the most effective way of doing this is showing that it is a person by having a photo of the speaker, This solves the issue of speakers and sponsor cards looking alike.

Speaker cards with photo

Speaker cards with photo and company logo

The cards without the logo do look cleaner and the cards with the logo look more crowded, but having a logo especially if its from a big brand definately helps promote an event.

Speaker Logo's

Logo's come in all shapes and sizes. When staff upload logos they are given a size eg 300px x 300px to upload at, when they come across as a logo that has a sqaure footprint they upload it as large as possible, the downside to this is when the logo doesnt have a square footprint it wont be as big. The quickest fix is to have a rectagular logo frame.

I tested this out with the same logo's featured earlier

Logo square frame

Problem
With the square logo area their is more likley to be unevenly sized logo's

Logo rectangle frame

Solution
By making the logo area a rectangle their is less likley to be unevenly sized logos

Speaker Card Debate

For the new speaker cards I wanted to make the site more obvious that people were speaking at our events, The easiest way to do this was to include speaker photo's on the speaker card, there was a internal debate within the company.
Should we

This debate strangely split the company down the middle with the event organisers and sponsorship wanting just Logo's, Creative and Marketing Department wanting just photo's, The side wanting just the photo's wanted a cleaner looking site, The side that wanted the logo said that the company was far more important than the individual speaker.

Cards Low fidelity

I did a quick user test to see if there was any benifit to including the logo on the speaker card.
The test was to display cards with just a photo and cards with photo and logo and see how quickly a user can spot the speakers from the most recognisable company and , The results were that with the logo displayed it was easier for users to sppot the top five companies speaking at the event.

Without the logo the card is definitely a lot cleaner, but having the company name just in text (not displaying the logo) does make it easier to miss.

Speaker Modal or speaker page

There are benefits and disadvantages for both. A full page doesn’t limit the amount of information shown however it does take the user away from the other speakers. The modal keeps the user on the event speakers page.

Modal

The modal design let users switch between speakers easily but did limit the amount of information shown.

Full Page

An individual page for each speaker worked well for displaying more information about the speaker eg their presentation bio, however sometimes speaker do multiple presentations and could get confusing.

Concepts

Speaker Cards

Meet the zuckerbergs

I moved onto to hi fidelity speaker card concepts, Using Mark Zuckerberg as a test (He was pretty current with lots of photo's of him, (he was never really a speaker at one of our events).

I really like some of the cards with bigger images but the images that we use are generally no bigger than 120px x120px and the photographs often aren’t professionally taken.

Top Three Concepts

Speaker names vary in length from very short to extremely long, the longest name that comes to mind is..... Schwarzenegger. So the top 3 concepts had the Schwarzenegger test how do they handle really long names.

Schwarzenegger Test

Size Matters

I wanted to test how a large speaker name, job title & company sits next to the opposite a short name, job title and company. Enter Arnie & Bono.

Logo at the bottom

Problem
The Logo at the bottom of the card makes the size of the gap more noticeable.

Text Logo Sandwich

Solution
The Logo being put between the text lets the space be spread more evenly.

Modal Concepts

The modal pop ups after the user clicks on the speaker card. The modal on the speaker page consits of the speakers profile information.

Finals

Final Speaker Page

As any UX designer knows a design is never really finished its just finished for now, New features are requested new improvements are suggested. Once the site is out in the wild, we start to get large amounts of data back from users behavior on the site.


Improvements

I think I'd' test the speaker modals on the value of the speaker profile infomation over the speakers presentation description. As I think potentially there is more value in details about the speakers presentation rather than the speakers biography or perhaps displaying both.

The speaker assets especially the logo's are still being uploaded at unequal sizes, This is definatley more human error than technical error, Maybe a solution would be a comparison logo to manually match up to.