How might we build a virtual townhall that supports diverse users, presents real-time data effectively, and enables inclusive Q&A?
How might we build a virtual townhall that supports diverse users, presents real-time data effectively, and enables inclusive Q&A?
Broadnet Access Live:
The innovative virtual engagement solution
Broadnet Access Live:
The innovative virtual engagement solution
Access Live, a virtual townhall streaming service, aims to facilitate inclusive, real-time communication among diverse user groups. Currently, users face challenges interacting smoothly during live events, most commonly virtual townhall meetings, which require different engagement modes depending on user roles and needs.
Attendees and hosts are also struggling to view and interact with live data such as polls and visualizations, and need a better way to engage in live Q&A sessions.
Client
Sector
Agency
Challenge
Access Live users face challenges interacting smoothly during live virtual townhalls, which require different engagement modes depending on user needs.
My Role(s)
Research, UX Design, Prototyping, Client Demos
Project Objective
Broadnet Access Live is largely used by local and small politicians to host virtual townhall events. 🗳️ These events are incredibly important for getting policy information, ballot measures, polls and other data to the community. Events like these require multiple specialized users with key roles and responsibilities that ensure the smooth order of events. In addition, the peak use of this product occurred during the height of the COVID pandemic, which caused a rough transition period as users who were more likely to show up to town halls in person had to adjust to a virtual climate and platform instead.
When I joined the project, I attended some of these virtual town halls on Access Live 1.0 to experience firsthand how rough the current process was. 🤔 There were several issues that were apparent from the existing platform.
Challenges & Opportunities
😵💫 Complex User Dynamics
😵💫 Complex User Dynamics
Access Live 2.0 must cater to different user types: hosts, event specialists, moderators, screeners, and attendees – each with distinct access levels, controls, and information needs.
⏱️ Time-consuming pre-event tasks
⏱️ Time-consuming pre-event tasks
There were too many things to be done before the actual event could even start, such as manually identifying users and roles – causing valuable time loss.
📊 Data Presentation & Polling
📊 Data Presentation & Polling
Presenting complex data and live poll results that are instantly understandable, accessible, and in real-time is challenging – especially given the varying digital literacy among users.
🙋 Q&A Functionality
🙋 Q&A Functionality
Moderators report difficulty in identifying, screening, and queueing questions to go live. Attendees want to ensure they have fair representation of their questions.
🥱 User Engagement & Participation
🥱 User Engagement & Participation
1.0 does not effectively encourage active participation from attendees, leading to disengagement and a sense of underrepresentation during crucial discussions.
❓ Clarity
❓ Clarity
We needed to improve the clarity, accessibility, and intuitiveness of a platform that contained multitudes of information, roles and features.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
A key advantage of completing this project at that time was the abundance of video streaming and communication platforms available for thorough competitive analysis. This was COVID times after all, and Zoom and Teams were becoming household tech names. ▶️
Wireframes & DESIGN
👯♀️ DESIGN TEAM
Early wireframing was largely just trying to figure out the most efficient and legible way to display the myriad of features needed for the different event attendees.
How do we handle event team chat? Where does Q&A go? How can we show all this without taking up too much screen real estate for the main feature – the video?
★ North Star ★
Ultimately, Access Live 2.0 needed to be self-serving.
Looking to the future, how could we reduce the amount of manual tasks the Event Support Specialist needs to do?
Limiting and even eliminating certain mundane or time-consuming user tasks would greatly improve townhall efficiency, speed, and overall user experience. 😃
Solution
One of the solutions to this issue was creating a way for the system could identify users 🔍 automatically, eliminating the extra pre-event steps, allowing event hosts and attendees to spend more time on the important aspects of the event, such as Q&A and polling.
We started creating flow-charts for this process.
user identification
While this project went through many iterations of visual styles 🌈, what was most important stayed the same – user identification.
Here we documented the event team display list for easy recognition.
Outcome
I rolled off this project before completion, to help support a different one. While I ultimately didn’t get to make the last marks on the canvas, I had a primary hand in the final result. Access Live now stands out as a leader in the virtual town hall industry. 🏛️
