ionSearch Social Dashboard - How It All Began!

http://www.blueclawsearch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Social-Dashboard.jpg http://www.blueclawsearch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Social-Dashboard.jpg

Here at Blueclaw we wanted to add an extra little bit of design flair into this years ionSearch conference. After thinking about this for some time I began to gather ideas about something that possibly had not been done before. Being a creative designer I looked at a way we could make the event more engaging for the people attending. I had a meeting with Anna in our Social Media Team who helped me develop the idea for what would eventually become the Social Dashboard.

From past experiences of attending conferences, at best we had seen a half decent twitter feed displayed somewhere around the networking areas, but with the way Social Media is becoming a major factor in how people share and discuss the conferences and content on offer we found it hard to believe that most dont offer something a bit more engaging and interesting.

An observation we had made was that a lot of people attending constantly sit with there tablets / mobiles / laptops making notes and sharing interesting things via social media. We began to have a look into a few things that would maybe be helpful and interesting to the people at the event. We thought about a way of giving important but interesting information to the attendees giving them a way of constantly been in the know about everything that was happening at the event itself.

I then went away and began to drag together some ideas for an app based interface that users could interact with to get everything they needed to know. Social Dashboard is something that uses individual content in a style where you can easily find out key information and view certain aspects we think you should know about.

We then sat down and developed a list of helpful “Apps” that we thought would be a great insight into the conference, this included:

• Day / Time
• Weather
• Agenda for all 3
• Break Times
• Live Twitter Feed
• Live Photo Stream
• Most Used twitter #
• Most Social Session Graphs

By coming up with the list like this we found it easy to visualise how this would begin to work and what needed to be done. The idea then was to make this a live url that people could visit on their selected device. Making this responsive was something that was made easier by the fact we wanted to incorporate each item as an app upon the page.

After a few late nights with one of our developers we had a working concept that did the job perfectly. The conference came and the social dashboard was pushed out into each main room on the big screens between presentations and on breaks as well as having a large screen set up on the main stairwell. The main stairwell got lots of attention with people commenting on the dashboard and saying what a great idea it was.
Something we feel really enhanced the experience of our conference and gave ionSearch something others have not had, at the end of the day we wanted to give each attendee the best experience possible as well as getting them a lot of useful information and tips from some of the industries best.
If you are interested in using our Social Dashboard for your event, Please get in contact here!