Background

What is Braindate?

What is the Braindate Organizer Space (BOS)?

A braindate is a knowledge sharing conversation that participants can have one-on-one or in a group, on a topic of their choice. It takes place at live, virtual, and hybrid events.

The topic market on the Braindate platform

The Braindate Organizer Space, or BOS, is a management dashboard created to support the success of the Braindate experience. BOS allows e180's Braindate clients to:

• Customize and setup their Braindate platform
• Learn how to better serve their community through our resources section
• Categorize and segment participant populations to gain community insights
• Monitor participant engagement and topics posted through real-time data
• Expand their participants' Braindate experience through a well-developed add-ons and integrations marketplace
• Understand advanced data analytics about their community through BOS' impact and reports pages

<aside> 👉 BOS gives clients the freedom and autonomy to create a truly customized Braindate experience for their community.

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UX Writeup: Braindate Checkins Dashboard

Context

Problem — Let's Rewind a Bit.

At e180, Virtual Learning Concierges (VLCs) are integral to the success of a Braindate event. VLCs act as both our technical support agents and as facilitators of peer-to-peer learning. They primarily use BOS and Tawk.to to manage their monitoring of and communications with users.

VLC Responsibilities

1. Respond to technical A/V issues
2. Respond to general user issues
3. Proactively reach out to participants and encourage them to interact with the Braindate platform
4. Monitor braindate checkins
5. Identify participants who have been stood up and try to find another participant to join the braindate with them
6. Identify empty group braindates and try to find other participants to join the group

Checkins V1 - In-Person Braindates Only

The original BOS, the Braindate Dashboard, was an internal-only tool and created when e180 only offered Braindate in-person and at far smaller scales than we now see with virtual Braindate events. At this time, Learning Concierges functioned much more as Braindate facilitators and community supports, helping users find their conversation partners at busy conference venues. Participants could not check-in themselves since there was no option to do so on the Braindate platform itself. Hence, this page:

As you can see, the original Braindate Dashboard was not optimized for VLC purposes. On my 16" laptop screen, I am only able to see 4 rows without scrolling, and rows do not even equate to one braindate. Rather, the host of the braindate is first, and their guests make up the subsequent rows (for example, the 2nd and 3rd rows represent one 1:1 braindate with Shant and Alexandra).

User research

To ensure we were building the right solution for our users, VLCs, we held an informal Zoom meeting where our VLCs could air all of their grievances about the V1 checkins page and request any feature they'd want – no holds barred.

From these meeting notes, I identified 11 main problems to be solved and asked our VLCs to order them in terms of which solutions would be most impactful to their experience.

<aside> ⚠️ As you can see, our user testing was limited to the 4 people within e180 who had the most experience with VLCing. Due to the fact that up until January 2021, only e180 employees could act as VLCs for events, we did not have a large user base to pull from for user testing and research.

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Identified Limitations

1. Time. We work on a 2 week sprint schedule, and our roadmap accounted for only one 2 week sprint for VLC functionalities.
2. Developers. We have 2 developers on our team — one backend, one frontend.
3. Existing product. Due to the above limitations, we could not reinvent the wheel and needed to work with the basis that was already there.
4. Our VLCs are not clients. All of the people we user tested with have been at e180 for several years, so they are very familiar with the inner workings of Braindate. Conversely, clients can come in with little knowledge of Braindate, so how could we account for their contrasting lack of familiarity?

Chosen Opportunities for Improvement

From this feedback, we decided to tackle the following problems due to the above limitations:

1. Events in time zones different to that of the VLC can cause scheduling confusion
2. Stood up participants are not easily identifiable
3. Online and in-video call icons are not clear nor accurate
4. No filtering abilities
5. Unclear what a participant has already done on the platform, so proactive next steps are difficult to offer in a timely manner

Design Solutions

0. The new checkins page, now called "Booked Braindates"

<aside> 👉 These solutions were the result of multiple rounds of user testing with our VLCs, and some sparring between devs, myself, and the BOS PM.

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The largest, and most impactful change I made was changing the participant-oriented rows into braindate-oriented rows, so a VLC could immediately tell if everyone had shown up to the braindate instead of scanning several rows and checking to see at which row that braindate stopped. This also allowed the VLCs to view several braindates at a time, reducing the need to scroll and go through multiple pages.