ICML: A Success Story from Participatory Design to Rapid Prototyping

What is ICML?

ICML stands for "International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma," an internationally renowned conference aimed at doctors, researchers, and professionals dealing with lymphatic system tumors. Held in Lugano for 4 days every 2 years, the city becomes filled with thousands of participants, mostly doctors accustomed to attending similar conferences worldwide. The event has been a great success, year after year, necessitating continual evolution in the digital tools used by professionals and attendees.
So, how can the enormous workload of professionals who make the entire conference possible be simplified? How can the participants' experience be made memorable and meaningful?

The Challenge

Imagine a city-wide conference with dozens of speakers and a team committed to ensuring that all stakeholders have the best possible professional and personal experience they have planned: an event that requires flawless organization and coordination. ICML represents exactly this kind of challenge: from managing participant registrations, organizing scientific presentations, to finding sponsors, the management software becomes the lifeblood of every aspect of the event before it happens, and an essential tool during it, to give participants access to the scientific program, by providing them with a map and personalized calendars, for example.

The main challenge was to improve the ease of use and overall user experience of the existing software, starting with guests and then moving on to congress attendees and speakers who work with it, our main stakeholders. Although we started with a valid software tool, we recognized the opportunity to better tailor it to specific customer needs and simplify some elements appropriately for professionals. To do this, we successfully applied Human-Centered Design techniques, starting from discovery and mapping workshops, to an iterative prototyping process.

What We Proposed and Achieved: Our Method, Its Results

Our method relies on the practices of service design and human-centered design. What does all this mean in practice? We conducted a research phase, a co-design phase, and a prototyping phase before moving on to development. We began our journey with a preliminary research phase, actively involving conference organizers, speakers, and participants. How? Through targeted interviews, which allowed us to understand, at a high level, what happens during these international conferences, what congress attendees and speakers expect, in short, what they need and are accustomed to from attending other international conferences.

We then added a key step: participation in discovery and co-design workshops, the first lasting 2 days, which involved all major stakeholders and some key users. In a participatory environment, through simple but targeted activities, we conducted workshop sessions to collaboratively define the different Personas (user segments) involved in the event. Stakeholders at the table got involved firsthand and were able to express the most practical and concrete needs: we thus outlined in detail the needs, expectations, and specific challenges of each group.

One tool we used was the Co-Design of Customer Journey Maps: based on identified crucial users and professionals, we conducted co-design sessions to map out the different stages of participants' and professionals' experiences during the conference.

A customer journey map, or “customer journey map,” is a visual tool that represents a customer's (or user's within an organization) entire experience with a product, service, or organization. This map follows the customer through all stages, from initial awareness to post-sale and loyalty. Every touchpoint, interaction, and emotion are recorded along the way, offering a comprehensive overview of the interactions between the customer and, in this case, the foundation managing the event. For us, this meant meticulously gathering needs, points of attention, and desired outcomes: a couple of well-organized and concrete workshops, as often happens, served us as much as dozens of meetings.

This process allowed us to identify critical touchpoints, enabling us to focus our customizations on areas of maximum impact. Finally, based on the information gathered during the workshop, we initiated a phase of rapid prototyping: here, UX Design (User Experience Design) practices guided us in developing prototypes, involving stakeholders in continuous iterations. This approach allowed us to constantly refine functionalities and the user interface to specifically meet the emerging needs, and importantly, not to immediately develop something that would turn out to be inconvenient and far from their expectations.

Collaboration and UX Design for Strategic Advantages

Collaboration and listening were the keys to our process. Often, those who are responsible for creating digital services invest heavily in the technological aspect, which we take for granted, and forget the human aspect, which can make the difference between a forgettable product and an experience that is remembered as truly significant: this means having satisfied reviews, good word-of-mouth, in short, seeing your customers return and your project succeed.

To achieve similar results, the conference organizers were an integral part of the decision-making process, ensuring that every customization fully reflected the expectations and objectives established together, and seeing with us, time and again, the prototyped proposals, so that they were developed only once confirmed by all. At the same time, the development team was always aligned with the decisions made during the design phase and constantly consulted for advice and perspectives.