Data Visualization

Austin Startup Week celebrates the Austin startup community by hosting a week-long event of meetups. As a broadly scoped event, it can be great for attracting a lot of people but it can also be a hard for newcomers to find value.

Our platform tackles three key issues using a quick visual tool to meet whatever networking objectives one might have for the week.

My Role

Project Coordinator on a team of 6 designers

User Research

High-Fidelity Prototyping

Developing Personas

Research

We set out to gather information about ASW activities, who gets involved, and what people seek to accomplish. We found pain-points based on user feedback and defined the existing user experience. Our research revealed there were three main groups of users a ASW: attendees, speakers and organizers.

We realized that by solving pain points for the attendee, more solutions may come up for the speaker and organizer experience.

Many attendees are startup workers who have very little free time, they want to be sure that the events they go to are valuable. We also found that social anxiety has an impact on the majority of people we interviewed.

Our platform tackles three key issues:

- Time limitations

- Finding value at ASW

- Social anxiety

Creating Personas

Initially we created our persona around the theme of social anxiety and moved forward into the ideation phase. At our mid sprint standup we realized how big of a mistake that was. Our UX team had been ideating for a persona that looked more like ourselves than our users. This was a big learning moment as we learned to remove ourselves from our work and instead embody the users we represented.

Ideation

Our group went through many possible solutions before deciding to pursue one. We explored ways for people to network before the event but kept circling back to LinkedIn and how it already offers those services. We also thought of options that used augmented reality and consulted with a developer at an augmented reality company. Their feedback helped us realize that our goals with using augmented reality were not yet feasible with current technology.

Our Solution

We solved by creating a mobile web app that visualizes linkedin information. The app allows users to quickly organize who they want to connect with at ASW by seeing who will be attending in advance. A user can decide they want to meet someone, view connection “routes” based on mutual friends, and ask a friend for a personal introduction. They can also refer to that friend for talking points when they have their chance to meet this new person. The app motivates attendance by reducing skepticism before the event.

Next Steps

Moving forward I’m really excited about exploring ways to involve in-app animation to help orient users as they transition between screens. We’ll start with creating a zoom feature for when a user wants to “quick view” a profile. We’d also like to use a radial gravity to represent association of elements on a screen. This may help create a more organic feel to the data visualization. Lastly, I’m probably the most enthusiastic about applying a linear gravity to search results. We would use this to show profile “bubbles” with strong connections float to the top of the display and weaker connections, having a lower buoyancy, and settling towards the bottom. Our intent with this is to shows a clear hierarchy of information for users.