MIX09 Live Player

Designing The MIX Conference Online Experience

As the Creative Director for the Microsoft MIX conferences held in Las Vegas each year, one of my tasks was to envision the evolution of the site dedicated to the conference and determine how it would appropriately changes over time to accommodate changing goals, audiences, and content-types.

Pre-Conference

MIX09 Site (Pre-Conference)

Before the conference, the website has primarily two goals:

1. Educating potential attendees about the conference, its focus, and content
2. Enticing the potential attendee to become an actual registered attendee and come to the conference

During the Conference

The day of the conference brings significant changes to the website. As the conference is in-progress, it’s no longer the focus to try persuade designers, developers, and others to attend — it’s too late for that. Rather, our job at this point is twofold, really:

To assist in the discovery and consumption of hundreds of individual videos, the conference website changes a final time by providing a deeper search and browsing experience. There are a few specific decisions here to note.

1. Provide an engaging and informative experience to the attendees onsite and help educate them as to where sessions are being held, guide them to interesting content, and provide information on events and social opportunities that may be occurring over the 3 days MIX is being held.
2. As our known and potential reach is multiplied by at least 10X on the web, we strive to provide an experience to the user who may still be very interested in the content at the conference, but cannot attend. To this end, a very robust, user-friendly, and reliable video-stream and player replaces the main section of the homepage and delivers content throughout the day.

As well, other changes are made throughout the site including the addition of a time/day based session scheduling system, and a “News/Announcements” section on the homepage, geared directly toward engaging the onsite attendee by providing timely and important information regarding schedule-changes, events, and reminders.

After the conference

Once the conference has completed, its the job of the conference site to once again switch modes, this time becoming the port an from which users can consume hundreds of hours of content that was presented throughout the con. All sessions are available on-demand within 24 hours of their completion. This enables thousands of users to consume the content presented at MIX, even if they were unable to attend. Additionally, this helps create a significant following for the conference, assists in retention of past-attendees interest and attendance at subsequent conferences, and entices new attendees to sign-up.

The Video Experience

The video player has been designed specifically to deliver high-definition Smooth Streaming live video and has had thousands of concurrent streams viewed at once. Built with a combined team of Microsoft Technical Evangelists and a solid technical team at Vertigo Software, the player was built based off the player originally developed for the Olympics hosted by NBC, and enhanced further for our specific needs.

Features of the Video Player

• Live, High-Definition Smooth Streaming Video
• Time-shifting

  When I say “time-shifting” I specifically refer to starting the viewer at the beginning of the keynote and letting them watch it all the way through, even after the live stream has been terminated. This proved to provide some technical considerations, but was worth the benefits of providing the full content of the keynote to all of those who wanted it, and didn’t cut off users who may have joined late or paused the video for some time.

• Jump-to-live — used for viewers who joined the stream after the video had started, but wanted to jump to what was going on at that moment.
• Commenting

  While I proposed this feature as a publicly-available feature allowing users to comment on the video itself, technical and legal restrictions required us to maintain control of the comments we would lay in throughout the video. What the user would see were small marks along the timeline, noting interesting points, the beginning or end of certain demonstrations, or other items of note.

The Mobile Experience

The MIX09 Mobile Experience

In addition to the main website, I designed a mobile application to assist with the discovery of sessions and events throughout the show. I designed the mobile experience to be similar to the site, ensuring some continuity, but found it necessary to consider a few things when making a final decision on the design and user-experience of the application:

Goals of the user

I designed this application specifically for use during the conference. This helped focus the design/experience decisions to ensure we were surfacing the most important information to these users:

• Sessions: where and when they were being held
• Agenda: when and where other interesting stuff is going on outside of Sessions
• Maps: Las Vegas can be disorienting, as can be the venue. To this end we ensured we provided a context-sensitive map for our attendees, helping them get to their Sessions, events, and, well, dinner on time.

The Environment

Considering the environment in which the users of the mobile app would be, removing distractions and focusing on the main content types of importance was paramount. As well, by reducing the complexity, density, and actual file-size of the information to be consumed, we did our best to mitigate what could sometimes be spotty signals or an overwhelmed cellular system in the conference center.

Platform / OS

While this mobile-app was designed for Microsoft and was coming *from* Microsoft, we had to be considerate of our platform/OS considerations in design and development. I did a reasonable amount of user research on the front-end, however, and quickly realized that our general attendee was not necessarily using a Windows-based mobile device, but an iPhone. Because of this overwhelming data, the decision to design for the iPhone as our primary target — while accommodating the Windows devices, of course — was the best way to serve the audience to whom we were trying to speak. Although there was push-back and concern raised, data won and we moved forward.

From Oliver Marks of ZDNet

Microsoft are doing a terrific job of demonstrating how to run a conference with their Mix09 conference, which is happening in Vegas right now. Click on the conference url while the keynotes are on and it is as if you’re there.

A live feed of keynote content – speakers and what appears on the projection screens – is right there on the front page along with a live twitter #mix09 stream.

My typical conference experience is to show up at the venue with laptop bag and lots of paper collateral, watch people on stage with the slides to their left or right, make notes, tweet, have a browser open with Twitter search on the conference hash tag and ask for the slides on a flash stick after presentation.

Rolling up all of the above into a seamless, single browser window, time efficient experience which allows us to focus on their presentation of the primarily user experience and visually focused conference presentations is hugely attractive and Microsoft have clearly done their homework to create a compelling and accessible experience. (It will be interesting to see what the archived versions are like).