Oregon Bioengineering Symposium
Digital Program
Project Duration: April 2026 - June 2026
Role: UX Lead
Summary: A digital program for the esteemed 2026 Oregon Bioengineering Symposium hosted by Oregon State University’s College of Engineering
Objectives:
Communicate with external stakeholders understand event needs and optimize designed outcomes.
Reformat a 50 page pdf into an easily navigable, compact digital program.
Produce a high quality product on a short time frame and oversee the duration of its time hosted on the College of Engineering website.
Research & Discovery
User needs & Business Goals
Through conversations with stakeholders, I gained an important understanding of event needs. The symposium required a lengthy program covering the schedule of the event along with talk information and/or biographies for roughly 200 featured speakers, panelists, and poster presenters. In previous years, attendees struggled to find relevant information in a timely manner, and staff wanted to minimize time spent searching to keep the focus on the event itself. From these discussions, I distilled my findings into a set of project requirements before recommending and implementing a strategic plan of action for the design phase.
Product requirements
Usability: attendees should be able to access session information, its time, and its details in seconds without flipping through pages worth of content.
Accessibility: the program needed to be fully web accessible to be compatible with assistive technology and meet WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards.
Timeliness: the program had a tight turnaround from receiving content from event staff and needing to be ready for the event.
Serviceability: end product had to be flexible to manage last minute content changes from the event staff including room, talk, and speaker changes without requiring heavy design and build lifts.
Design Strategy
Pivot to digital
After getting a strong understanding for user needs, content requirements, and business objectives, I decided to pivot from a traditional pdf program used by the event staff in previous years to a new, digital program webpage. This transformed the event schedule into a navigable resource with accordion drop downs of further details for each event. It improved usability by reducing the odds of users scrolling through pages worth of content, and meant that the program was fully web accessible. To ensure the page was up in time for the event, I constructed a layout that was easy for the development team to build and oversaw the process from start to finish to ensure we met deadlines.