Product Development: Solve site and event activation

Homepage of Solve site, live here. 

Homepage of Solve site, live here. 

The event:  "Solve" was an inaugural event hosted on MIT's campus in October, 2015 which the MIT Technology Review produced and programmed. It was an initiative of the MIT Office of the President intended to bring together some of the world's brightest minds to examine and address the problems where technology, business, innovation, and smart policy can be leveraged to bring about real and lasting change.  

Site requirements:

  • Educate the public on the event's vision and mission (and entice people to want to attend) 
  • Allow prospective attendees to register their interest/request an invitation
  • Allow invited attendees to register 
  • Provide updated information as it became available    

Our approach:  The plans for this first annual event were coming into focus right up until the day-of, which required the site to be flexible. For that reason, we created a phased launch plan for the site based on the information available at a given time, as well as what we wanted people to be doing on site as the event approached. 

Phases: 

  1. Event announcement: Splash page that went live October 2014 when the President's office announced the event
  2. Marketing site & Registration : Allowed interested parties to learn more about the initiative, and request invitations to attend. Also allowed invited attendees to register using RegOnline vendor Live January, 2015 with several iterations as language changed and more information became available. 
  3. Members Only Portal: Created a space for registered attendees to access for further information about their area of interest, as well as documents that addressed logistics for the event itself. We partnered with MIT Press to use a tool they have developed and made some tweaks to suit our purposes. Live August, 2015
  4. CMS for News section: Worked with a local Drupal specialist called Knectar to create and launch a CMS to allow event editors to post and curate their own news about Solve. Live September, 2015
  5.  CMS for rest of site: Finished out scope with Knectar to include other interior pages in the Drupal CMS. Doing this meant that anyone - not just a developer - could make quick copy changes on the fly (a very important feature for an evolving event like Solve). Complete: January, 2016

 

My role: 

  • Planning and strategy with the Solve team
  • Scoping
  • Project and resource planning
  • Vendor collaboration
  • Budget management
  • Project management
  • Quality Assurance

The team: 

  • Emily Waggoner: UX/Design lead
  • Jason Lewicki: Senior Software Engineer