The creative process and my role

This new format is now being used for all our events – from Annual Meetings to Regional Meetings. I led the user experience, design, and product specifications, managed the development build done by an external supplier, and liaised with Livestream, YouTube and our streaming media team to make sure the usability and performance were reliable and exceptional.

Needless to say, some new feature development and testing was required at very short notice during Davos, as surprise Use Cases arose – such as sessions running into excessive over-time. I liaised with the overall team during Davos to make sure all of these exceptions were dealt with, releasing new and fully tested development builds each night of the meeting’s five days.

Development team and technologies

The webcast widget and its calendar layout is fully modular. Parameters in its API code allow it to have different components, columns, configurations and sizes – from a video-only player to a full page searchable programme with topic tags.

A team of 3 managed the Livestream schedule, encoding, and widget CMS. An external team of 4 built and tested the widget, its API, and CMS on Google App Engine. And several team members from both Livestream and YouTube were available to run their services and troubleshoot any issues.

About the author

This post was written by Scott David whilst he was at the World Economic Forum, leading their User Experience strategy and design, across their digital platforms for data-driven knowledge and communities of global leadership.