Hybrid Conferences

The Process

This project was developed to explore different ways the conferences might occur in the near future (post-COVID era). Since virtual conferences are becoming a norm, and people are getting used to the new ways of interaction, I was interested in looking at how limited physical and digital interactions can enhance the experience.

Research

•         Domain Research

•         Secondary Research

•         User Research

Synthesis

•         Themes

•         Opportunities

•         Problems Identified

•         Ecosystem

•         Design Direction

Ideation

•         Personas

•         Mindmapping

•         Concept Ideas    

Service Design

•         Kotler’s 5 Model

•         Scenarios

•         Customer Journey map

•         Blueprint

Prototyping (with touchpoints)

Evaluation

Goals

• Explore different conference models and analyse the values

• Identify possible interventions for a conference service

• Building a service for better user engagement in a conference model to enhance the experience for attendees

• Conceptualising and designing a few of the touchpoints that the attendees will interact with as a part of the service

I was motivated by blended learning (An educational approach that combines online educational materials and opportunities for exchange online with traditional place-based classroom methods. It requires both teacher and student’s physical presence, with some elements of student control over time, place, path, or place) and Phygital shopping (blend of e-commerce, virtual tours, and personal shoppers in physical shopping experience).

Research

The Primary, Domain and Secondary research was done with 8 users, and 3 conferences to understand the pain points, values and experiences offered by the virtual vs physical conferences. Read about it in detail here, the insights can be found below:

Scope

Context:

To build the conference structure, I decided to take IndiaHCI as a representative conference. Having a model conference provided me with the necessary scope and context to work with. IndiaHCI is an academic design conference organised by IndiaHCI-PAI annually in a different location each year. It fulfilled the criteria for the conference that I was looking for.

Audience:

An academic conference consists of two parts - internal (organizers, volunteers, reviewers) and external (participants, keynote speakers, sponsors). In this project, my focus was on enhancing the participant engagement in a conference.

Ecosystem and stakeholders:

To understand the working and context of IndiaHCI better, an interview with a chair was conducted. It helped me investigate the inner working and tasks of a conference.

Ideation & Selection

After ideating, keeping the research and pain points in mind, ideation was done to lay out features the service should have. The major point participants seemed to be missing was the sense of co-location, serendipitous networking, and bond creation, keeping the monetary, time, and effort constraints in mind. Keeping these factors in mind, a hybrid satellite event was selected to combine the physical and digital aspects of a conference.

A hybrid satellite event will combine the in-person physical event with a virtual one. These conference events will also give users the flexibility to attend the conference in different modes, according to their convenience and requirements. This mode was selected to allow the participants to attend the event in-person co-located with other participants, even if they are not able to attend the main event due to different circumstances.

Design

These events will be held in three modes:

• The main conference (in-person event at the main event location)

• Hybrid Satellite Conferences (in-person at several different geographic locations, virtually connected with the main event) the satellite event can be organised in an organisation or institution affiliated with the conference organisation present in that respective localities.

• Online (individually, at a place of their convenience).

  
  

  Hybrid satellite events will be cost-efficient since the resources and infrastructure in use are leveraged from the pre-existing network. An example of a satellite event can be found in Global Game Jam. GGJ is a 48 Hour long gaming hackathon where people from different backgrounds come together and meet locally to collaborate and create games. These collaborations happen all across the globe and prove to be local, convenient, yet globally connected. They also broadcast keynotes question and answer sessions and free live streaming content.

Personas:

Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map explores the journey of the participant throughout the conference. The map describes the different encounters that the customer has during different stages of the conference orchestrated by the conference organisers. The basic skeleton of the map was developed according to the framework of the conference modes running in parallel.

Blueprint

A hyper-localized event is a satellite event that can be hosted by an attendee at the place of their convenience. These events are self-motivated and self-initiated. Hence, a hyper-local event is by its nature, intimate and attended by people living in the same locality, the attendees can catch up and attend the conference from nearby. This provides the attendees with the flexibility of attending the conference in their preferred mode.

Touchpoints

1. Personal Hub Concept

• The online personal hub integrates all the different tools in one single place to reduce the cognitive load of the participant

• The synchronous and asynchronous content is embedded inside the webpage

• People can access the Interactive conferencing tool like gather.town parallel to the talks to give the maximum effect of an in-person conference The users are notified for the talks that the participants registered for

• Participants can chat amongst each other and between modes as well to maintain interactivity

• The participants can also contact and ask doubts to the speakers or get their feedback

• Online and offline assistance available

2. Virtual Network

• The participants are located on the graph according to their interests

• A link between two people is formed when they share the same interest or are working in the same area

• The clusters of interest are formed

3. Additional Artefacts

• Food delivery for everyone attending it in hybrid or virtual mode

• An IndiaHCI box with all the necessary material for workshop, miniature prototypes, pamphlets explaining the talks, etc to enhance the lifetime of the conference memory

4. Digital hygiene

• Protocols and training for the moderators and presenters can be shared.

• The SVs can manage a group of people so that the participants have a contact in case if assistance is needed

5. Conference box

The participants will get a box of artefacts and materials from the conference. The idea is to make the participants feel included in the conference and as a part of the larger event. The box will have various elements from the conference, some functional, others as an artefact. These will include the conference schedule, the talks brochure, artefacts, 3D models or QR codes related to the talks, interaction cue cards, and workshop related materials. These will be sent to all the virtual, hybrid and main conference participants

6. Other Touchpoints

Other touchpoints included rule books, failure recovery system, organisational flow, and a digital zone concept. Head over to the detailed report to view these.

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Live Service Prototyping and Testing at IndiaHCI 2020

Preparation for Live Service Prototype at IndiaHCI

• Hyper-local event Prototyping Blueprint

• Virtual Event Poster and Demo Session

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Live Testing of Service in IndiaHCI

• Hyper-local satellite event service design testing

• Role of a host

• Participants of the service testing

• One week before the event

• Three days before the event

• Two days before the event

• One night before the event

• During the event

Virtual event service design testing

• The hub (Tested with Gather.io)

• Interactive conferencing tool

• Pattern Language usage

  
  

Evaluation of the Live Event and Touchpoints Designed

The service was evaluated by doing qualitative user interviews and via questionnaire. It was done with the genuine attendees of India HCI conference 2020.

Key Insights

To evaluate the study, qualitative methods were used to gather the data during the experiment. This data is kept confidential and anonymized for the sake of privacy. The questions asked for the interview can be found here The questionnaire distributed can be found here

Hybrid Event Evaluation

The insights gathered from the participants interviews and observational notes are listed below:

• After the first two talks, the service sustained itself, people started using the laptop to connect and change the talks and having conversations in between. - Value co-creation naturally prevailed

• Facilitating conditions are designed- users took advantage of servicescape and by the end of the day, used it at the end. They all had a shared experience. Eg. One participant saw a casio at home and once the conference was over, he played it for everyone to enjoy and everyone listened to songs and talked.

• People kept the WhatsApp group alive even afterwards- interacted to share their designs, ask for suggestions, etc.

• Participants ended up staying for the entire duration and missed the virtual interactive events - so the schedule should be designed in a way that the participants do not lose out on much

• Concentration was slightly less but more discussions took place naturally

• Interaction in the virtual space did not happen while they were in the hyper-local mode

• Came close to the feeling of being in the conference but wasn't quite there. Users mentioned being mentally in the space of conference

• Retention was better due to the discussions that took place around it (Around 50-80% recall rate)

• Much easier to focus back on talks- people explained the concepts to others. More exploring and learning experience was noted.

• The ice-breaking from the last two days helped set a comfortable tone- "Usually feel anxious but it wasn't the case due to the size and the acquainted people" and socialising was much easier

• Networking and collaboration opportunities (one participant got helped in the assignment from another)

  
  

Online Event Evaluation

The key user insights that were derived from the user testing and Questionnaire were:

• The "spirit" of a conference was missing and it felt inauthentic, no reason/motivation to watch it over doing chores

• There were no stakes- "listened to it like a podcast"

• Too much navigation to access content. "The tools we used seemed shoddy" Cognitive overload with the tools- Intimidation by unknown tech tools

• Had other chores that they started doing instead parallely

• Videos/presentation were visually boring/not pleasing, "felt like a drag"

• Retention was poor (on an average- users remembered only 2-5 unique topics/papers)

• Attendance was poor (on average- users attended very few sessions. maximum 50% of the content watched)

• The virtual environment event for Poster and Demos session (Gather) was liked by all the people who had joined. The touchpoints designed for Gather were used by the participants. The result could be found here.

The questionnaire disclosed the following information:

• Participants were able to join the conference virtually due to lower registration cost and better accessibility

• Almost all the participants ( >80%) attended the conference asynchronously or were in and out of the conference

• The major reason for participating in the conference was to build network (with new or old people) and connect with potential collaborators

• The participants were not fully able to focus on the talks or absorb the information. They also felt socially uncomfortable.

• By the end of the conference, few participants were not able to talk to others that they were interested in talking to.

• Half the participants attended the Interactive conferencing tool- poster and demo session.

• 33% of the participants were not able to focus on the poster and demo session

• The overall experience was satisfactory and the responses showed that participants would attend an event on Gather again if given a chance.

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Experience & Reflections

Since this service design was able to be tested and prototyped in some capacity, there were valuable insights that were gathered through that process. The participants had had different behaviour and levels of comfort and interactivity with the service and other participants, which led to detailing out of the blueprint and the service even further. Each mode has its own pros and cons that were evaluated during the prototype