SmartLab Digital Events
Project Overview
The Challenge
SmartLab is predominantly used for hosting and supporting digital events, including internal meetings, conferences and learning programmes. The digital events hosted on SmartLab can be broken down into three design categories; illustrated, photographic and adboard. The primary challenge for every event was to curate virtual environments and user journeys that were engaging and unique. Each event would have additional challenges related to project timelines, client communication and required supporting material.
The Solution
Through active communication and planning with the client teams, we were able to create immersive environments that boosted the overall experience of these digital events for the participants. These events could range from 30 to 500 attendees and would receive positive feedback due to the personalised and unique journey that was built to cater to the exact needs of the client and the event. These projects were so successful that SmartLab became the go-to hosting and supporting platform for many clients; including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Merck, Deloitte and Takeda.
Illustrated Events
Illustrated events would often have multiple environments created in which the interactive hotspots would take the user through the event or learning journey. The clients for these projects wanted to create an environment that would make their platform more engaging and take people away from the sometimes sterile and dull work space. These illustrations would come from exploring a general theme that the client would provide, ranging from team building and adventure to futuristic cities. After selecting an illustrative style, we would build the scenes based on the primary focus for each environment as well as the supporting material.
Adboard Events
Adboard events involved just one primary landing screen. These landing pages would have hotspot buttons that would lead to resources, learning pages, collaborative apps, meeting links and so on. These style of events were often used by clients that did not want to focus on a digital journey, but were instead using the platform to utilise its other features - such as the collaborative apps and resources whilst hosting the virtual meeting (i.e. through Zoom or Teams). The adboards would often run over multiple days, with the background being changed each day by our team ahead of the next event. With this update, all of the links, resources and apps would be refreshed to match the next agenda.
Photographic Events
Similar to illustrated events, photographic events would have multiple environments belonging to a set theme to immerse the user in the world of the meeting or learning programme. The photographic events would often take an environment and add branded detail or elements using Photoshop. These added elements would work as key information points for the hotspots to be anchored to and to welcome users to the conference or meeting. These were often the most difficult projects as it would require a lot of research to find the right background image that fit not only the objective of that scene, but also the wider event collection so it didn't look out of place. A huge amount of editing to include the required objects and branding into the space was often required.
