Staging a Social Community Experience
By: Uday Gajendar
Tags: User Experience, UX, Conference Planning, Design, Event Planning

But the bigger question remains: How do you pull these core elements of scenes, exchanges, and materials together gracefully? How do you set up the interfaces such that everyone feels they can understand and maneuver through the various interaction pathways present in a conference? (by the way, who really are the customers you’re designing for? We’ll get to that in a moment!) And doing so while propagating a sense of community and the opportunity to learn, grow, build. There has to be a pragmatic sense of the takeaways to be shared back at the office to justify the expense, as mentioned earlier. After all, the budget might not be there next year!

Here’s what I’ve identified that needs to be correlated to achieve positive effects:

The participant journey (across multiple scenes and exchanges of content). Sure, it may sound trite, but any conference or workshop event is a journey of awareness, discovery, understanding, and self-realization for everyone involved. From that first tweet to the last feedback survey, consideration of that journey is vital to enabling a memorable, rewarding experience for everyone. The starting points, the thematic structure as a bridging of conversational moments all throughout, toward the final wrap… and also afterward! Remember the post-journey moments, of appreciatively and gently nudging to the next event, when you may spin up the journey all over again. How does it all flow together, from end to end, entry to exit, so that it feels intentional and balanced?

The points and paths. This is basically the arrangement of the agenda pieces, all those scenes and exchanges and content items…into a meaningful structure optimized for social engagement, knowledge transfer, and, frankly, other forms of human nourishment — which means great snacks and plenty of breaks for fresh air and coffee! Even some musical interludes to break up the frequencies of attention, or as palate cleansers between sessions to help shift mindsets a bit. Consider those transitional moments that guide the audience (and speakers) across the thresholds of topics and discussions, and how to facilitate such movements with a sense for the tempo and temperature.

Useful artifacts. Yes, this can refer to the swag bags, filled with fun albeit banal toys and shirts with logos. But this also refers to other artifacts that shape the arenas of social encounters: the posters, signage, name badges, schedules/brochures, and interstitial slides. And don’t forget book signings, whiteboards, job boards, tables with LEGOs, and stickies and markers for ideation! Some are take-home, while others serve as references along the exploration of pathways across scenes and exchanges.

The people. This is the whole crux of the matter, right? But who, really, is the audience you’re staging this event for, and who else is involved? Remember to consider the speakers (what do they stand to gain and strive to convey in their talks?); the sponsors (how do they want to get their name out and empower their brand?); the staff/volunteers (typically uncompensated, so what will they get out of it? How can you create an opportunity for volunteers to really contribute and serve as gracious hosts or leaders?); and of course the attendees — what are their expectations and goals? Never forget the cycles of feedback from the attendees and others, to sustain productive future iterations!

It is clearly a complex endeavor to stage the social-interaction encounters to achieve shared understanding and significant knowledge exchange, with valuable outcomes. But it is well worth the pressures and stresses of the challenge, if only to help everyone feel more illuminated about the topics and practices of design. So, the next time you’re at a buzzy UX conference or messy workshop, consider how multiple pieces came together for you — or didn’t! There is of course inevitably the “madness of the launch” of the conference or workshop itself — worthy of another essay on logistics and Murphy’s Law…but in the end it’s all about setting the stage for compelling conversation. To design such professional social events is to manifest a shared story, sparked by some question or problem, whereby you are intentionally shaping the conditions for crucial conversations. These should be about the essence of our practice, our arts of creating meaningful interfaces and interactions that may linger in the form of those golden nuggets each of us seek to pass along to our peers for our community of practice.