Salesforce LIVE
Dreamforce is an annual 4-day long conference hosted by Salesforce. Although the physical venue (in San Francisco) supports only 60,000 attendees, the online stream of the event has the potential to draw millions of viewers worldwide. Along with a small team of designers and developers, I helped to create a live multi-channel broadcast experience.
Role
Interaction Designer
Results
Exceeded expectations and benchmarks set for 4 million viewers by reaching up to 8 million unique visitors worldwide.
Contribution
UX Conceptualization
Interaction Design / Prototyping
Challenge
Our challenge was to design a interface that displayed four unique channels of content streaming simultaneously. Furthermore, we had to evoke a sense of immediacy in live streaming content? Because this platform was to be built not only to host live streams, but also to act as an archive, a unique challenge of the project was in clearly emphasizing and drawing attention to streams happening live vs. content that was already recorded and stored on the site.
Interaction Modeling
Here, I prototyped a variety of different interaction models for when users would change from one live channel to another. The goal here was to ensure users gained a clear mental model for moving between live streams so that they could more easily navigate through the entire site.
I used Keynote transitions to prototype these simple interactions. Although certainly not the most robust of prototyping programs, Keynote is great for providing proof of concept.
Simplifying Chaos
Because there were four different channels of various content streaming simultaneously, having a simple and easy means of visualizing the events of the day was imperative. I had to consider different means of emphasizing the events that would be occurring right now, as well as those that would appear later. Having an easily understood overview of the conference was crucial in having users come back and tune into certain events that they were interested in.
I came up with the idea of having a live, interactive calendar that users could access at any time to understand streams that are occurring now, and which ones are in the future, which they could save to their calendar so as to not miss it. Not only does this provide users with a valuable schedule for speakers (as many people tuned in only for certain talks) but also highlights exactly what is happening now, exemplifying the live factor of the conference as if they were actually there.
