In September 2018, I became a board member of TEDxCMU, an annual conference and independently organized chapter of TED bringing together some of the world’s most bold and innovative thinkers to Carnegie Mellon University in a 400+ attendee event. I was responsible for styling the front-end of a new web application built for attendees, speakers, and board members.
Roles
Front-End Developer
Timeline
6 months
Team
Bennett Huffman, Dean Dijour, Vicky Ye
Tools
React, Firestore, Heroku, SCSS, Figma
Vision
Create an application to engage the audience with speakers on-stage through new forms of interaction and communicate with our 27 board members at the 400+ attendee event.
Link
The innovation team ideates solutions for problems in the board and to enhance the event experience. We brainstormed with the board to identify potential problems and ideas where we could use innovation within the organization.
As TEDxCMU has grown in the last few years to a 400+ attendee event, management and communication have become considerably more challenging. Last year, a tech problem delayed the event by nearly an hour. With less than 30 board members, we needed a solution to help mitigate problems like these. We chose to build a new web application that could the needs of multiple stakeholders and potential problems.
We created personas for attendees and board members, storyboarding use cases for an application. We discussed what these stakeholders need, and how they might navigate the application.
Our Head of Innovation, Dean Dijour, created mid-fidelity prototypes from our early designs t present to stakeholders and help validate our design decisions in Figma.
TEDxCMU's Head of Design, Vicky Ye, thoughtfully designed high-fidelity mockups based on the mid-fidelity mockups provided and user needs. I used this as a model for the styling of our application.
Attendees can easily access a live schedule. The app auto-scrolls to the the current event, which pulses. A top banner also indicates any event information or announcements, if a TEDxCMU board member overrides it. They can click on speaker cards to view more about them and ask questions, and make a “ripple” on the ripple page to visualize where audience members come from.
Speakers can log in to answer questions from attendees on the “My Questions” page. They can change their answers later and delete replies. When a speaker replies, this information is displayed on the Speaker Q&A page for attendees to read.
Some board members can log in to update schedule times and create event announcements. Changing these times works live, so users never have to refresh their phones to view updates.
If interested in learning more about our next undertaking, please contact me at bhuffman@andrew.cmu.edu.