Techweek
Showcasing New Zealand technology, innovation and design brilliance.
- UX/UI design
- web development
- consulting
- Managed application stack
Silverstripe website and event management portal user experience design and development.
Techweek is a nationwide programme of over 100 events celebrating the inspiring technology, innovation and design thinking that’s thriving across New Zealand. They came to Springtimesoft to develop a new website that would interpret their creative brand and effectively showcase the events taking place during Techweek.
Sustainable foundation for future growth and development.
We joined the Techweek whānau in their second year with a focus on the future. Maintainability, scalability and flexibility were vital to a successful website and allowing the team to grow their offering.
Our key whāinga (goal) was to build a strong foundation to the event management process that could be built on and streamlined as Techweek’s platform grew.
The resulting event portal allows for registered event organisers to submit event ideas to be reviewed by regional coordinators who can provide feedback or approve events through the Silverstripe CMS. The tool then allows each event organiser to independently manage their listing on the website before submitting this to the Techweek team for approval and publishing.
In 2019 over 500 events in 2019 have been moderated, managed and published in this manner.
We codesigned a digital platform for Techweek’s yearly cycle.
We undertook a platform design process in order to understand how different people could interact with Techweek and gain or add value – not only during Techweek but in the months prior.
This included persona development, user journeys and mapping the interaction points.
This resulted in:
- Creation of an online forum: discussion.techweek.co.nz for potential organisers, speakers, venues and sponsors around New Zealand to share idea and find others to work with. Created using Discourse
- The moderation workflow that allows regional coordinators and the Techweek team to provide feedback on and curate events
- Assisted in developing the website’s information architecture
Example of the Platform design notes from our workshops, using the Platform Design Toolkit
500+ eventsDuring Techweek19, managed and moderated via the online portal and filtered on the website
20+ locationsModerated by individual regional coordinators managing the events process
95,000Unique users across the Techweek’18 promotion period
340Users of the Discussion forum in Techweek’18
Open source and collaboration.
In keeping with Techweek’s spirit of community and supporting New Zealand technology, we used the open source software platform Silverstripe. Silverstripe has a strong community both locally and globally which enables Techweek to leverage that and continue to build their software.
The brand was revamped in 2019 by Method.Digital, we worked with the team at Method and Techweek to bring this brand to life on the website.
2019 has also seen integrations with iTicket, Ackama and n-tech to bring additional features such as integrated ticketing, a chatbot and webcasts to the site.
Other highlights
Saving events to schedules
Session based schedules that allow users to save events they might be interested in. Includes the ability to email the saved schedule and returnto it at any point.
Location based relationships
We extended the user permissions of Silverstripe to relate Regional Coordionators to their locations. This meant that anytime a new user signed up interested in Hawkes Bay, or a new event was submitted to be hosted in the region - the Hawkes Bay coordinator would have the access they need to manage it — without clutter from anywhere else.
Event previewing
Techweek organisers have obligations to their speakers, sponsors and other stakeholders when listing their event. An event preview function allows them to externally share their event draft for review.
Accessible and sharable filters
Over 500 events means it is crucial for users to narrow down events to what they’re looking for. In order to ensure the majority of Techweek’s users have equal access to finding events, the filters on the website are keyboard and screenreader accessible. The filtered results can be shared via URL which means people can share smaller lists of events with each other, and use these to promote events in their regions or sectors.
- Silverstripe
- PHP
- Bootstrap
- Sass
Jackie Clark — Techweek’17 Project Manager
