TEDxMelbourne

A new website for a new era.

In 2019, TEDxMelbournes website in an unusable state, with bugs, unclear development  standards, broad usability issues. Leaving the organisation unable to utilise this medium to provide value for their audiences. This required the redesign and redeveloped the website from the ground up, giving us flexibility to continually evolve the platform the way we seem fit.

Read more about the TEDxMelbourne Website launch here

Building a website from the ground up enabled us to rethink the architecture of the site.
The previous website had a basic CMS structure, however its use varied the course of  activity.

Areas to improve that are critical to users were:

• The event purchasing process
• The information and richness of blog experience.
• General Information regarding TEDxMelbourne Organisation.
• The volunteer and speaker application experiences.
• Web Accessibility

The development of the digital experience has been an iterative process over several years. However there have been some key principles that have led to getting the most out of the website.

Creating a frictionless experience for attendees and organisers.

• ‍‍All new features integrate with existing tools and inform organisers in a place that suits them best.
• CRM like automations allow interactive elements of the website, such as contact forms, and applications, inform the user when they’ve submitted an application, and the likely response time they will receive.
• Allowing contact forms to integrate with usable back end tools, have enabled us to easily audit the types of responses we receive.

Support existing workflows

• How can we bring more value to current activities that we provide.
• How can our digital experience support operation critical workflows for staff?

Be adaptive and experiment.

• The website is a medium that brings cohesion across our digital experience, while bringing freedom to how we express and craft an experience for the audience. During the pandemic, our digital experience heavily relied on innovative ways of engaging with attendees, this brought experience such as a hybrid music festival, and interactions for user generated content.

User experience and event accessibility

TEDxMelbourne is undergoing a major exercise in addressing accessibility needs across our service experience.

An initial change has been to focus on wayfinding and navigation across our web experience. We rebuilt our navigation bar and tested using keyboard travel and tested using a screen reader.

Redeveloped TEDx Talks experience

TEDxMelbourne have a catalogue of over 140 talks. Hence it was important for us to consider how a user could filter through these talks to find useful talks that connected with them. Dynamic Filtering system based on keywords and text filtering for the browsing page.

Furthermore, the video page itself was aimed to focus the users towards the content to the talk itself. Including having recommended videos based on similar categories and date of talk.I developed a custom UI video player using plyr.io, which allows us to build brand cohesion through the experience.

Our next feature that we hope to add to the talks page is a transcription button.

Team recognition / organisation info experience

As a volunteer organisation. It was necessary to give as much recognition to the people behind tedxmelbourne for what they deserve. So the TEDxMElbourne team section was given particular importance.

This also helps the audience understand the overall structure of a tedx team if they want to join or get involved.

Clean integrations with critical platforms

Using API integrations, our team were able to use Eventbrite for event organising features yet seamlessly integrate it within website experience.

Outcomes for the organisation:

• Having a usable web experience has helped the organisation maintain footing over their customer journey.
• It’s empowered the organisation to be experimental with their audience interactions.
• It’s centralised the brand’s output and has given the audience something to be proud of.

Outcomes for users

• An integrated customer experience across platforms creates a cohesive awareness of brand.
• Faster customer service response times with higher successes.
• Feedback is implemented more regularly and with speed.

TEDxMelbourne United: An hybrid event experience to reconnect the artists of the TEDxMelbourne

Overview:

In late 2020, TEDxMelbourne had come of the back of a year of successful virtual events. This event sought to introduce a new experience for our community that celebrates a huge part of our audience, the creative and artistic.

Role:

• UI/UI Design and Development
• Technical Support and Coordination
• Art Direction Partner

Outcomes:

This event introduced our artist pass engagement, an ambitious audience interactions that involved our audience to create user generated content.

Furthermore the delivering this event introduced a challenge for a small team to deliver an engaging live experience to both the in-person and online audiences.

You can check out what was created via:

tedxmelbourne.com/music-salon/artist-catalogue

tedxmelbourne.com/event/music-salon-united

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Insights

• Through preliminary research done by focus groups with consultancy Prime Motive, the TEDxMelbourne audience desire authentic interactions and collaboration with sharing their own TEDx story or message. Not everyone can be a speaker. But there can be other ways of expressing this.

Solutions

• Creating an event that’s central to cultural features of Melbourne, music, Arts, Creativity.
• Providing an alternative platform for our audience to express themselves through TEDxMelbourne.
• Creating a frictionless experience for artists to receive free access to our event while also getting a platform for themselves to share their art.

Challenges

• Designing and delivering a hybrid (in-person and virtual) music festival.
• Building a platform and workflow for parsing and optimising user generated content.
• Coordinating a secure access for paid online events.

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User generated content

Creating a system for handling user generated content at scale was a challenge of journey mapping and web development, requiring rigorous testing and coodination.

The solution meant that artists could easily submit a profile and once approved, would immediately appear on our site.

Creating a system for handling user generated content at scale was a challenge of journey mapping and web development, requiring rigorous testing and coodination. The solution meant that artists could easily submit a profile and once approved, would immediately appear on our site.

Insights

• Through preliminary research done by focus groups with consultancy Prime Motive, the TEDxMelbourne audience desire authentic interactions and collaboration with sharing their own TEDx story or message. Not everyone can be a speaker. But there can be other ways of expressing this.

Solutions

• Creating an event that’s central to cultural features of Melbourne, music, Arts, Creativity.
• Providing an alternative platform for our audience to express themselves through TEDxMelbourne.
• Creating a frictionless experience for artists to receive free access to our event while also getting a platform for themselves to share their art.

Challenges

• Designing and delivering a hybrid (in-person and virtual) music festival.
• Building a platform and workflow for parsing and optimising user generated content.
• Coordinating a secure access for paid online events.

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Hybrid event design

The design of the event required experimentation and collaboration between team members. This space was new for most of us however we were up for the challenge.

Ambiguity calls for alignment

The design of the event required experimentation and collaboration between team members. This space was new for most of us however we were up for the challenge.

To unpack and understand what would be required to run this event, we steps through every part of the event delivery in the form of a service blueprint.

The process of mapping the journey allowed us to test and question aspects of the event, well ahead of the event launch.

Outcomes for the organisation:

• The artist pass catalogue accounted for 8% total unique page views across the TEDxMelbourne domain during Q1 of 2021 and the website saw a website viewership increase of 16%.
• The organisation gained strengths of experimentation which has led us to push events further.

Outcomes for users

• The event introduced new ways to engage with TEDxMelbourne, new ways to be heard and to have a platform.
• Participants from around the world had the ability to engage with TEDxMelbourne in a more authentic way than ever.