To Adapt to the COVID-19 Process as a Product Designer in the Event Industry Company
As we all know, the world is fighting the covid-19 virus. During this period, many sectors were negatively affected. Some experiences we have in social life have been replaced by online experiences. In the company where I work as a product designer, we develop digital products for event organizers and I can easily say that the industry we are in is one of the most affected industries. In this article, I will try to explain how we adapted our products to the online experience and how I managed this process as a designer.
Interaction with people and other people is the basis of doing a social activity. In line with the constraints that came with the pandemic process, the experience of the most natural actions of people had to change. Of course, the event sector was also affected by this change, and concepts such as face-to-face meetings, close contact, crowded communities, closed areas were the most affected by this change.
With the organizers bringing the events to the online experience, companies that develop digital solutions in this sector also had to add products to their product sets that allow them to experience virtual experiences. In addition, we, as the product team, have designed and developed many online dating experiences.
In this article, I will talk about how to design a virtual experience with you.
Our Own RTMP Live Streaming Player
At the beginning of the pandemic process, the key to bringing the entire event experience to an online experience was of course the ability to deliver presentations online.
Why?
We will be adding our own streaming platform via AWS services so especially Zoom related issues can be solved.
Considering the hugely competitive environment, we have integrated Zoom into our own applications for a short-term solution, providing our customers with the first stage of moving the event process to the online experience.
In a short time, in line with the feedback and reviews, we gathered from our customers, we saw that the Zoom API was that some native features were restricted to access.
During the design process, there was no very complicated structure on the end-user side. We did not try anything different from the usual media player usage, and especially we took care to protect the common points in the interfaces of our 3rd party integrations like Zoom, Youtube, Vimeo, Twitch, Vistia, DailyMotion, Facebook, Streamable, SoundCloud.
On the part of broadcasting and making presentations of speakers, we have provided a perfect live broadcast experience with Streamyard integration.
Attendee Interactions (Chat, Q&A, Polling)
Questions & Answers
We will be adding new functionality to the Event App Mobile and Web where Q&A will be a separate component or a section within a session or a live stream. The purpose is to replace Zoom’s Q&A functionality which is not reliable all the time thus keep the data on our systems to support the Data Dashboard project in the near future.
Polling
We will be adding new functionality to the Event App Mobile and Web where Polling will be a separate component or a section within a session. The purpose is to replace Zoom’s Polling functionality which is not reliable all the time thus keep the data on our systems to support the Data Dashboard project in the near future.
Undoubtedly, one of the most important parts of the event experience is networking and engaging.
For the participants, this is to be able to chat among themselves and with the speakers, ask questions, meet with sponsors; For organizers and sponsors, polling participants are among the most important types of interaction.
We did not forget to include this type of micro-features when designing the online event experience.
Of course, there are more features to be mentioned, but in general, kinda these similar features are basically the things that make up the virtual experience.
So how did we manage this process as product designers? In fact, in general, these are the features that digital products in many sectors have integrated into their structure. For example, Airbnb has published the experience category called “virtual experiences” in the Covid process and made this feature possible with Zoom integration. Another example could be many digital products in the education sector. And similarly, in the event industry where I am currently working, all companies have developed features that make the online experience possible.
The first article on this process was a general perspective. In the following days, I will try to convey the details of each feature with articles one by one.
