Newcon · Designing the YouTube of conferences

Year: 2021
Product: Web App
Role: UX/UI designer and front-end developer. User research, Sitemap, User flows, Wireframes, High fidelity prototype, User testing, Brand identity, development in Webflow

Project summary

Newcon is an online platform where users can discover and stream conferences, and conference organizations can monetize from them.
The aim is to democratize and facilitate the access to specific knowledge.

Challenge

My task was that of understanding both the audience and the organization's key needs, goals and frustrations - and design the MVP on the audience side. 

Solution

First of all, I arranged a session of user interviews, and then defined 3 personas based on their polarized objectives: to watch conferences for study, for work, or out of curiosity.

More specifically, according to intervieews, Newcon should:
- Make them feel enriched, motivated or inspired
- Let them find videos on a specific topic
- Let them find videos from a specific speaker/conference
- Allow them to discuss about a topic with the speaker, and/or other people (and potentially network with them).

The dichotomy between 1. wanting to discover new content and 2. quickly find specific content led me to designate the home page as a place of discovery, and the other navigation pages as places to search - by theme, event or speaker.

In addition to this, users needed to perform specific actions while watching the conference, namely:
- Take notes and screenshots while watching the video, and save them
- Read subtitles, translations and slides while watching the video
- Download video, audio, transcription, translation, and slides
- Save videos for later
- Browse on other windows while keeping a video preview open

For this reason the video player UI has been designed in a modular way, allowing users to perform these actions simultaneously, from both full-screen and default mode.

Results

Once the prototype was finished, I tested it with 12 users, and then I organized the feedbacks in a Miro board, dividing them according to their nature: usability, visual, general, marketing and feature suggestion.
In this case I was particularly interested in testing the impact of the visual identity. The response from users was unanimously a sense of familiarity due to the proximity to the youtube layout, but a completely different, slower and more meditative sensation. Since it was the feeling we wanted to archieve, we proceeded developing the platform in Webflow in the following 15 days. We chose this solution in order to keep development’s timing and expenses contained for the first release.
As a result, in the following 2 months 10+ big conference organizers (Female founders among them) decided to trust Newcon to host their conferences on the platform, and more than 500 users have subscribed, projecting Newcon towards the first round of substantial funding.