Process

Research

I kicked off this project by researching the industry demographics and analyzing related companies. Then I surveyed and interviewed people who regularly attended conferences. My goal was to gain an understanding of the industry and to find pain points.

Insights

The most consistent feedback we received was that users expect to exchange business cards at conferences, but they were not interested in using apps that scan business cards.

Apps that scan business cards to add contacts are not desirable to use.

A user's preferred type of contact information depends on the user's profession.

Users do not follow up with people they met at a conference because they forgot what they spoke about.

There are apps made for major conferences, but users do not like installing an app for each conference they go to.

Ideation

Instead of coming up with the features and solutions on our own, my partner and I included the developers in the process. We found this difficult to do in an open zoom call, so we facilitated a 2 hour design sprint. Before we started, I gave them a presentation on design sprints so that they were clear on how it works and what to do.

Reframing the problems into questions

We voted these as most important during the "How Might We" exercise of the design sprint. We turned the key pain points into HMW questions and used them to guide our design decisions.

How might we make exchanging info with our phones more engaging?

How might we allow users to show their preferred form of contact info?

How might we enable a way to help users remember their meeting with others?

How might we give users the option of only needing one app for conferences?

Question 1: How might we make exchanging info with our phones more engaging?

We were surprised to see that not a single one of our interviewees liked apps that scanned business cards because all of them said they collect business cards. Since everyone uses business cards, we felt that it would be best to take inspiration from it.

Business card exchanges are easy and fast. There is no loading time, buttons to press, feedback, or cognitive load.

Proposed Solution

Create engagement with touch gestures

This solution is based on the assumption that users people would be more likely to use a feature that they were already familiar with. We created a concept for a digital business card. To "give" someone your business card, you swipe the card off the screen toward the person in front of you. This would activate near-field communication (NFC) technology to safely transfer data.

Problems with this idea

We were initially excited about this idea, but we ran into a few major blockers while creating user flows. What would happen if there were a room full of users with NFC open? How much longer would this take than simply exchanging business cards? What kind of privacy issues would arise from being able to see who is nearby?

New proposed solution

Add an option to Scan QR code

Instead of abandoning our idea, we created an alternative feature to address the potential issues of NFC. By having the option to scan a QR code, users would have a much faster way to add a contact and it will also give the user a secondary option if NFC isn't working. Also, this solution is based on the assumption that users would rather scan a QR code than a business card because because it's an unnecessary task to scan information they already have.

Sketches of concept

First iteration of concept

Final iteration

Near-field communication

Scan QR

Question 2: How might we allow users to show their preferred form of contact info?

In our surveys and interviews, we saw a wide-range of results for preferred contact information, and they seemed to rely on the user's profession. We knew that a benefit of having a digital business card is being able to modify the information anytime you want and we made that our focus.

Proposed Solution

Option to display preferred information

Instead of figuring out what each profession needs, we give the power to the user to decide what kind of information they want to exchange. This gives the user power over what information people can use to contact them.

Question 3: How might we enable a way to help users remember their meeting with others?

One of the questions I asked in the interviews was why they didn't follow up with someone they met at a conference. Many of the reasons had a common theme: that it was because they did not remember enough about their meeting.

Proposed Solution

Take notes and remember location

Users often forgot, but you can't expect users to always take notes. This feature would automatically show where you met, so that if you open the app later to add notes, you'd have a mental reminder that may help you recall the meeting.

Question 4: How might we give users the option of only needing one app for conferences?

Through our competitive analysis and user interviews, we found out that people enjoyed the apps made for a single conference. While these apps are great, it's frustrating for superusers to install a dozen apps without a way to extract the contact information to a single repository.

Proposed Solution

A platform for conferences to register their event

If conferences can create an event, similar to creating an event on Facebook, users could register for the event in a similar fashion too. I think that this would create potential monetization for the product.

Overview of Solutions to Questions 2, 3, 4

Final concept of profile page (responsive web version).

Final Result

Here was our video at the end of 8 weeks. It was a lot of work for the developers to do in a short amount of time and I am grateful to be paired with them. They put in extra work to implement as much of my designs as possible.