Agenda Builder

Challenge

The OpenText Marketing team wanted prospective attendees to create customized agendas of conference sessions to justify cost to management and help attendees manage their time at the event.

Discovery

Understanding our users

We developed personas PDF based on previous conference data—prospective attendees, registered attendees, and internal Sales people—then through a collaborative process developed a set of user stories based on their needs.

Perspective Event Attendee persona

Concept

Creating a personalized agenda

Building on our user stories, I constructed wireframes PDF to encompass the agenda builder journey: finding sessions, adding sessions to an agenda, viewing an agenda, making changes, and finally sharing an agenda. We reviewed the initial concept with the Marketing team and iterated the design until we had satisfied the business requirements.

wireframe of the sessions page
wireframe of the agenda page

Validation

Vetting the design before development

My colleague and I performed usability testing PDF with participants who had never used the Enterprise World site, utilizing paper prototypes and recording the sessions to review with the rest of the team. Using candid participant feedback, I was able to show stakeholders PDF where design and requirements needed improvement before moving into development.

screen shot of a usability test

Top Finding

Participants found the warning message that popped up when adding training sessions to their agendas confusing.

You must register for training sessions. Adding a training session to your agenda does not register you or guarantee you a spot in a session. If you have already registered for the conference, you can add on training sessions.

I thought that's what I was doing, registering for a training session.

Participant 3

Design Change

We adjusted messages about registering for training to in context alert boxes based on a user's registration status for the conference.

Please purcahse this training session when you register for the conference.

Development

Accommodating the existing site

The conference website was already live, so we had to work with the web team to adapt our concept into the existing design. I helped keep us on track during development by managing issues in JIRA for each deployment.

Additionally, I created test plans PDF for quality assurance and user acceptance testing and was responsible for verifying development tasks after deployment to QA.

screen shot of a usability test

Results

Finding out what users think

After launching the project, I wrote a usability test plan PDF that we ran with eight participants on the live site. Feedback PDF was generally positive for the design and functionality of the agenda builder piece, but we did uncover some usability issues that arose when people navigated the site as a whole.

screen shot of the Sessions page

Top Finding

Only two participants were able to sign in to the site successfully meaning the task had a 75% failure rate that participants rated as difficult. The problem was two-fold: most users gravitated to the "sign in" link in the upper right of the page, but this link took them to the 3rd party registration site; additionally, the "sign in" link within the page content did not stand out.

screen shot of the Sessions page with sign in links highlighted

The sign in button is always on the upper right side, at least it is for 90% of all websites, so that's easy. [...] Oh! No, no, no. Sorry that's something that’s wrong.

Participant 1

Design Recommendation

The "sign in" link at the upper right should take users to the website's sign in page. Once signed in, the link should change to "sign out". Links to the 3rd party registration site should be clearly labeled and differentiated. The "sign in" link next to the agenda builder could stand out more.

screen shot of the Sessions page with updated sign in links

Rachele DiTullio headshot

About Rachele

IAAP Certified Web Accessibility Professional

I believe in information integrity and accessibility for all through inclusive design principles and I have a wide breadth of knowledge in many areas of web standards and user experience design including HTML, CSS, cross-browser testing, accessibility best practices, information architecture, interaction design, wireframing, prototyping and usability testing.

I earned my Master's Degree in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin School of Information external.

Contact Me