Building a better conference experience through user-centered design

In this poster, we present user experience research demonstrating that current tools designed to facilitate conference communication and organization fail to support the needs of attendees and the goals of academia in general. Current conference technologies have failed to support the scholarly exchange of ideas at conferences, both in effectively facilitating dialogue at conferences and preserving those exchanges for later scholarly purposes. We recommend new information models and interfaces that can better support how conferences actually work that, when utilized, can better facilitate the exchange of ideas and can prevent that exchange from being lost in the ether.