Being a design practitioner for over 10 years, I have attended hundreds of different conferences for various reasons; learning new stuff, knowledge sharing, build relationships, catch up with friends etc — just like most professionals out there. A thought suddenly popped up in my mind four years (2011) ago.
“Why do I started to feel indifferent about attending these events and the experiences are kind of similar; uninspiring, impersonal and unfulfilling?”
Since then, I have started a journey to answer a question “Can a conference experience be curated in a way that makes audience feels fun, inspiring and personal again?”. The best way I can conceive is to step into the shoes as a conference organiser by conducting experiments to validate hypotheses, and explore ideas from a audience-centric perspective.
After running two successful sold-out user experience conferences in year 2013 and 2014 with a group of like-minded volunteers, we have learnt a great deal on some of the mistakes made and identify areas that needs further improvement. While at the same time, we genuinely believe a new way of curating conference experiences has been created — a conference experiences that people loves, that matters to their professional lives, and create impact beyond the event.
In this upcoming presentation at GEVME Xchange 2016 event, I would like to take the opportunity to share our journey on creating conference experiences that matters to your audiences.
Some of the learnings include:
- How to find out what matters to your audience?
- How design principles can help to guide decision-making process?
- How to build a community that creates love for your product (conference)?
- How to develop meaningful relationships with your audience, speakers, volunteers, partners and sponsors?
- And more importantly, staying true to what you believe is the right thing to do for your audience
I look forward in meeting you at the event!
