A conference agenda is not a brochure
I built a small companion app for the T3 CTO Summit because I wanted an agenda that was more useful on my phone. This is an admittedly elaborate response to wanting to know which room to go to next, but here we are.
The useful distinction is between looking at an event before attending it and using its schedule while you're there. Beforehand, you want to know who's speaking, which topics are covered, and whether the event is worth your time. During the event, the questions become much more immediate: What's on now? What's next? Where is it? Can I get to both of these talks?
The underlying information is the same. The priorities in the different contexts are not.
I'm already here
A conference website has a lot of jobs: It needs to explain the event, attract attendees, acknowledge sponsors, introduce speakers, and sell tickets. All reasonable things to do. An attendee standing in a corridor has a rather narrower problem.
They need times and rooms to be visible without opening every session. They need to find the current point in the day without scrolling past the morning again. If two interesting sessions overlap, they need to know before saving both and assuming they have made a plan.
Speaker biographies are useful too, but following one shouldn't make you lose your place. Close the detail view, or press Back, and the same day, filters, and position should still be there. Otherwise, a perfectly ordinary act of curiosity turns into a small navigation penalty.
An agenda with a memory
For the T3 companion, I used the organizer's published schedule feed and built around day and room filters, search, a shortcut to the current part of the schedule, and a personal list of saved sessions. Overlaps get a warning. Sessions have space for private notes, calendar exports (generated in-browser) let the calendar app handle reminders.
Favorites and notes stay in the browser. As everything is in local storage, there is no account to create, which removes a fairly substantial amount of ceremony from remembering that you'd like to see a talk. The trade-off is, of course, that your other devices don't magically know your plans. Also, you probably shouldn't clear your browser storage until after the conference.
The app can work offline after it has downloaded the required files, it will show a little indicator to that effect. Sync is opportunistic and best-effort. Obviously, there are limits to offline information, too. A cached schedule is as good as its last sync and the underlying data: It cannot know about a room change nobody has delivered to the original data source - or your device. The companion therefore identifies its schedule snapshot and links back to the official agenda. A useful offline copy still needs to be honest about how fresh it is.
What I'd ask of an event agenda
The essentials are fairly modest:
- Put the time, room, and session title together where they can be scanned.
- Make "now" and "next" easy to find.
- Preserve context when opening and closing details.
- Let people save a plan and see where it conflicts.
- Distinguish missing information from an empty schedule.
- Explain whether the schedule is available offline and when it was last updated.
None of this requires an app store download, a social network, or a recommendation engine. The companion was a small static web app, now taken offline after the event. Installed copies can still work from their downloaded schedule.
The most useful feature of a conference app may be how quickly it lets you put your phone away and go to the talk.