Design project - Interactive Q&A session for conferences

How can we innovate and improve an already established interaction in events?

I was Lead Product Designer at mobLee, whose main product is an event app that acts as an event guide and interaction platform between attendees. This project intended to bring more engagement during the event and improve an already existing form of interaction: Q&A sessions. This was prioritized in order to improve the satisfaction of medical conferences, one of the company’s bigger client segments.
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For this project, I worked as a designer together with one iOS developer, one Android developer, and a Web developer. Besides the design project, I also helped in developing the front-end for the web platform.

APP DESIGN | MULTIPLATFORM

mobLee

Lead Product Designer

May 2016

The problem

Q&A sessions are an integral part of seminars, conferences, and other keynote and talk based events. Most of the events we worked with used to do them in the traditional way, having people raise their hands and someone take a microphone for them to ask something, consuming precious time. Some were using a digital solution that was considered expensive and made attendees create a new account in a new system, which was confusing since they were already using the event app. Because of this, we decided to incorporate a Q&A solution within the event app to streamline this process.

Users and audience

We had three types of users with different tasks for this project:
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1. Event organizers who would manage Q&A sessions.
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2. Event attendees who would send their questions for speakers and round tables.

3. Speakers and moderators who would choose and answer questions.
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Organizers were the main focus of the product. So their value perception was more important than the others, but as secondary costumers, their opinions would affect the organizers’ perspective too.

Main Goals

1. Give more agility to the Q&A process.
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2. Provide the organizers more control over the type of questions being presented at a Q&A session.
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3. Give attendees an easy way to submit questions to speakers and round tables.

Understanding the current solution

This project came from a demand from our clients that was identified by our Customer Success team. Organizers doing the Q&A in the traditional way suffered from attendees that would take too long to ask a question and with questions about sensitive topics. Attendees regularly complained that Q&A sessions were too short or that other attendees made irrelevant questions.

Some event organizers were using digital solutions to try to solve this problem, mainly Sli.do. In fact, some were using Sli.do inside our own app through webviews. For each session of the event, they had an area where attendees could post questions, give upvotes to the ones they liked and speakers could post polls to attendees.

To use it, attendees had to input the event code, find the session, and create an account. While organizers could use Sli.do inside our apps, this produced a work overload because they had to input the schedule both in the app, for the event guide, and in Sli.do. Creating a new account within the app was also very confusing for attendees.
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Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

Multiplatform user flows

Based in the requirements, while preparing the user flows I realized we needed a new type of user: the moderator. The information gathered from customers showed that people who ran each session would usually be hired or even volunteers. Moderators needed to see questions for approval, needed to be able to delete questions, and to mark a question as answered, but shouldn’t have the same level of access as organizers, who were all mighty.
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Until then, the event organization mainly managed the app content from the web platform, the app was completely focused on the attendees’ experience. Understanding that this new feature would also be used in the stage, I made it multiplatform, allowing for moderation to be made either in the web, through a computer, or through the app.

Sketches of the web platform and the app

Working on the app and web flows side by side

The solution

The feature would be integrated within the schedule feature of the event app, with each session having its own Q&A area. To minimize work while setting up the feature, I defined that once it was activated, every session registered for the app would have a Q&A area by default. Organizers could then deactivate the feature for specific sessions, like coffee breaks (I believe they would be very popular, though).

List of questions qaiting for moderation approval

Optional moderation

If moderation is activated, questions must be approved before appearing in the app. This gave the organizers complete control over the content, but they needed to be conscious of the extra work to manage these questions, emphasised by Customer Success. This could be done either from the app or from the CMS, to give more flexibility to moderators.

List of most popular questions in a session

Priority to popular questions

Attendees could like questions they found interesting besides submitting their own questions. Popular questions were shown on top, to help moderators choose the next one. Questions already answered would be tagged as such and moved to the end of the list, so the focus could be on the new questions.

Relevant even after the session is over

The ability to not only like, but also comment in questions created the opportunity for answered questions to be discussed by attendees and even by the speakers themselves if they had a profile in the app. This extended the knowledge exchange even after the Q&A session was finished.

Ready for use at the stage

In order to support speakers while answering the questions, I decided to include a visualization mode to be used on the stage screen. It would highlight the question being answered and present the other questions in popularity order. Through the stage screen, both the audience and the person answering would be able to check the original question when needed.

Question list in the presentation mode, the web platform and the event app

Synced through all apps

The same questions would be shown through the app, the CMS and the visualization mode and could be controlled by the organization through any of them, so they all needed to be in sync. When the moderator chose a question to be answered in their app, the visualization mode would update to show the new question on top and rearrange the other questions, sorting them by the number of likes.

Testing the solution

To access the question area, there was a button on the schedule detail screen. Initial tests revealed that when oriented to send questions through the app, people looked for a specific “Q&A area” in the menu. As an option, I included the possibility to add a Question menu that would show current sessions and the next ones to happen.

Another solution for it was to allow organizers to create notifications and posts in the home area of the app that would link directly to the specific question list.

Notifications about questions and the list of ongoing sessions

While working on this project, the sales team closed a deal with Endeavor, for one of their events. They were willing to use the new feature, so I prepared a prototype in Invision that could be presented to them. They requested it to have a single area for all questions. Seeing that most of our clients needed separate Q&A sessions in order to not mix up the questions of simultaneous sessions, we managed to provide them with a workaround without compromising the solution for the others.

Outcomes

The Q&A feature, along with the Rating feature, is one of the most used features in conferences. Organizers use them to measure the quality of the content being presented. The initial version did not provide any form of report for the Q&A sessions, but organizers soon started asking for numbers and means to export the questions for speakers.
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The feature requires preparation by the event organizers, not only in training the moderators and audiovisual staff but also in providing internet access. Our customer success team is constantly stressing the importance of testing the feature beforehand at the venue.
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This feature was used in both editions of Inception, mobLee’s own event, with great reception from the event organizers present. It’s fascinating seeing their reaction when the feature is being used live and their interest in bringing the solution to their own event.

Panelists answer to questions from the audience with the help of the visualization mode

Questions visualization mode being used during mobLee's event Inception

Interactive Q&A sessions for conferences