VDA Virtual Event Platform
VDA Virtual is an immersive 3D virtual event platform that allows attendees to experience live events in a hyper-realistic digital setting.
Overview.
Role.
User Experience Researcher
UX & UI Designer
Team.
Apple Tranova
D. Breen
Mark Keen
Duration.
May -July 2020
VDA is an experiential marketing and event design agency based in Boston. For nearly 30 years I was the only one in the company that had a background in user research and product design, so I took the lead on almost everything UX and UI related. On the product design side, I planned and conducted user research, synthesized findings and created prototypes of the interface, some of which where sketches and some semi-functional mockups.
What follows are snippets of a few of the efforts I led and contributed to in my time at the company. I’ve found it strangely difficult to summarize my time at Power BI due to the wide-range of projects and initiatives I was involved in. Let this serve as a summary of the highlights, and if you’re curious for more details, I’m happy to expound in person.
- Problem
COVID-19 cancels all live events.
The global pandemic outbreak prompted quarantine, and cancellations, putting the entertainment and the live events industry on hiatus. In response to the corona virus threat, many brands decided to cancel or postpone their events pinned for 2020.
Not knowing how long it will take until gathering attendees in person is safe again, VDA decided to look for innovative ways to keep events going and pivot to virtual events production and hosting.
- Challenge
How do we translate live event experiences into the digital world?
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
- Marketing Research
In order for a event planner to use a virtual event solution, they must embark on the following path:
- Customer Discovery
Next, I performed a series of behavioral and customer discovery interviews.
As like most small businesses strongly hit by COVID19, we’re stretched quite thin! With this challenge, we often have to reiterate our designs in order to be achievable within time and technical constraints, while still providing more value to our clients and attendees.
I included in-app messaging showing summaries of your event once it ended. Since this would require extra time for developer complexity and logic, we transformed this into a post-event email summarizing net sales and tickets sold.
- Customer Journey & Emotional Landscape
In order for a event planner to use a virtual event solution solution, they must embark on the following path:
- Ideation
There were many things that a solution could have, but I decided these were the most pressing.
The job was extremely challenging. First, there was the challenge for the whole company to find the right business model and product direction for the technology we developed. As we explored different models, I not only needed to take into account the user research findings, but also the business hypotheses we wanted to validate. Then, designing the product experience was hard. Since we were based on novel technology, we were exploring a completely uncharted space. Unlike a messaging app that already has standard design patterns, we were trying to make design data accessible and useful to people. According to various use cases, how to expose the handles into the data, and how to present the data, were hard questions to answer. Iterations of brainstorming, prototyping and testing were our way to try to find good solutions in the space.
- Challenges & Compromises
Unfortunately, one of our main challenges is the lack of resources and time that we have day to day.
As like most small businesses impacted by COVID-19, we were stretched quite thin! With this challenge, we often have to reiterate our designs in order to be achievable within time and technical constraints, while still providing more value to our clients and attendees.
I included in-app messaging showing summaries of your event once it ended. Since this would require extra time for developer complexity and logic, we transformed this into a post-event email summarizing net sales and tickets sold.
- Learning Curve & Design
Other than the high-level challenges, I also had to pick up a lot of the practical design skills myself. Hult gave me great framework and theories to approach design problems, but the skills that ensure good execution were a bit lacking, such as applying good typography practices, developing a consistent visual style, designing UI transitions, etc. In my day-to-day job, I tried to learn and improve. I’ve made significant progress and am still learning.
One of the major design challenges for me, was to figure out content organization and the entry of the data interaction as well as the direct communication between the 3D environment and the interface itself.
It was difficult to just use traditional prototyping tools such as Sketch to prototype, as real data and interaction with the 3D environment was needed to see the effects, and we needed to know how technical constraints interact with the interface design. I built a functioning interface prototype in Adobe XD that showed the relationship between the 3D environment, the digital interface and its content. It took us a long while to finally have a beta version.
- Next Steps
The 1st released version of the platform has been well received by our customers.
However, there are still improvements that can be made. An event organizer should be able to filter their data even more, and customize the view based on their needs.
We helped revised a foundation that allowed us to build on top of, adding in a home for global level features and functionality such as Account Level Discount Codes. The patterns and designs created would later help inform future parts of the product as we constantly strive to improve our Event Organizers’ experience.