Background
Signal Aware Dashboard helped Earth Day Texas (EarthX) Identify Traffic Flow and Event Attendance to Enhance their event attendees’ experiences.
Signal Aware is a data analytics company that provides real-time analytics services for the events industry. They approached me to join their team as a freelancer and design a dashboard for their client, Earth Day Texas. Earth Day Texas needed a solution to help them determine the total, new, and returning visitors at their exposition over a 4-day period. Also, to establish a pedestrian traffic flow analysis for indoor and outdoor activities and streamline the experience for attendees and exhibitors.
Signal Aware developed a cloud-based platform that provided real-time information and historical reporting. With the Signal Aware dashboard and technology, Earth Day Texas was able to collect and analyse foot-traffic data at the event and create a better event experience for both attendees and volunteer management.
About the client- Earth Day Texas
Earth Day Texas (EarthX) is a nonprofit organization in Texas that promotes a positive impact on the environment through education, events, and curating a public platform for sustainable thought leadership. They hold the largest environmental exposition in the world annually during Earth Day in April. In 2016, Earth Day Texas hosted over 130,000 visitors, 800 exhibitors and 300 speakers at Dallas Fair Park.
Jan 2017 - Apr 2017
What I did:
User Research
Prototyping
Company: Signal Aware
Client: Earth Day Texas
Launched: April 2017
Early Insights From Research Findings
As a team we started by interviewing the Earth Day Texas team to get more insights on what they needed and what their pre-existing problems were . Our goal was to identify all the problems and understand the challenges they faced when managing a large conference with around 130,000 attendees.
Lack of real-time data insights to track traffic flow
EarthX wanted to identify the popular feature, determine how many people were coming to each building per day, and analysis the foot-traffic patterns.Session Time Attendance
With over 500,000 sq. ft. of conference space it was challenging to determine the amount of visitors for all sessions with the current set up. This hindered accurate attendance counts for future marketing, event scheduling and employee management.Accurate Exhibitor Pricing
Due to lack of data from previous years, it was difficult to provide accurate information to make smart decisions for future events. They need a more solid data on the foot-traffic patterns so they can better price booths to the vendors and sponsors and also ensure that they are getting the best ROI.
Approach
Anonymously track attendees to get real-time traffic flow patterns.
Our solution was to deploy 28 of Signal Aware’s hardware nodes around the exposition venue’s critical areas of interest and intersection – general entrances, public transportation areas, vendors and exhibitors, speaker sessions and special events. The hardware nodes send out a “ping” every minute. The attendees mobile devices will receive the ping and the Signal Aware software captures that data. This helped us collect crucial information such as area traffic flow, peak times, session attendance, and new and returning visitors. I helped research and design a real-time business intelligence dashboard to display the analytics data that we collected in visual elements such as graphs and charts.
Dashboard Development
Based on the research findings, I structured the dashboard key features and wireframe the dashboard.
Sketches
Wireframes
Persona
A persona helped us better understand EarthX “s (our user) need.
Final Dashboard Design Solution
A smarter event management experience.
Venue Heat Map:
Provides real-time insights on attendees’ movements and identifies popular attractions. This insight helped the event manager making critical decisions such as allocating crew or improving security.
Real-time Attendees Tracking:
These charts provide insights on the total current visitors and their capacity coverage throughout the venue. The traffic volume chart tells the participation number trend throughout the day.
Hardware Nodes List:
This lists out all the current working nodes, showing their active status and each location’s current attendees.
Alert of potential event issues:
An event manager can set a maximum capacity percentage of a specific area, and if the nodes senses it has gone over the percentage number, it will trigger the dashboard alert to send out a notification. This allows an event manager to quickly address busy areas for public safety, trash and volunteer management.
Comprehensive Report:
At the end of the day, all the data is collected, analyzed, and presented as a visual infographic to understand high level details on the reporting page. An event manager can find their popular or unpopular attractions, peak times, and different time frames of attendees’ number and their comparisons to other days or times.
Export and Share:
The report can be easily downloaded in 4 different file formats or easily shared with colleagues by email.
Outcome
Analysis of key zones allowing for the increase in revenue by exhibitors in future years
Post-event analytics to provide better advertising opportunities for sponsors and exhibitors
Sessions, special events, and speaker attendance was tracked to establish if they should be invited back next year or be moved to a smaller or larger stage the following year.
Better floor plan management can be made and improving both attendees’ and vendors’ experiences
““Thanks to the real-time tracking capabilities of Signal Aware’s hardware combined with their advanced analytics dashboard, we could easily track visitors at our conference and establish important factors to increase revenue, improve traffic patterns and create a more informed plan for the future.” ”