The Socializer
Jeremy gets a notice on his event badge of an invite to a meet up he might be interested in. From here, he can accept and have it added to his schedule.
Taking advantage of the conference's Ubiquitous Computing system, Meredith writes on the event wall that she's interested in having a casual meet up to discuss a lecture that she missed. The Socializer finds candidates that it thinks would be a good networking match with Meredith and that attended that lecture, and sends them an invitation.
The Socializer is a proposed ubiquitous computing system designed to promote networking at conferences.
After choosing our target user audience and defining our goal, we began by brainstorming possible concepts. We then narrowed these down to concepts that we felt were financially and technologically viable, illustrated these into storyboards.
These storyboards were presented to a range of professionals and students who had attended the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in the past, through a user research technique known as Speed Dating. By presenting our scenarios and getting fast feedback, we were able to better identify the user's needs and adjust our concepts to fit.
Once we recieved this feedback, we revised our script, recorded voiceovers and staged photos, designed our interface and, finally, created a video to quickly explain how The Socializer would work in a conference setting.
This project was done in collaboration with Andrea Fineman and Mohit Taneja. SXSW is a music, film and interactive conference held annually in Austin, TX. We do not own any rights to their name or logo, and any mention of SXSW was used for the purpose of constraint and direction in this project only. Information about SXSW can be found here.