A New Events App
for McGraw Hill Education

McGraw-Hill Education (MHE) makes learning tools for students ranging from pre-kindergartners to post-graduates. While most famous for its textbooks found in classrooms around the world, it also offers best-in-class digital learning programs in just about every subject imaginable. Each year these products are on full display at the hundreds of conferences the company hosts nationwide, where company representatives show teachers, professors, administrators, and other educators how to incorporate MHE products into their own curricula. Attended by hundreds of people, each symposium is filled with featured speakers, small-group sessions, and lots of other learning opportunities. Attendees can get overwhelmed trying to do it all.

Defining the Need

Recognizing a need to keep event-goers informed of all the goings-on, MHE tasked my team with launching an event-specific mobile app. The company wanted to not only furnish its guests with all the pertinent event information, it also wanted to encourage interaction and engagement among its clientele and with the brand. Considering the huge number and frequency of events and constantly growing user-base, complete device compatibility and mobile-forward design were essential to providing a cohesive, usable experience for all attendees.

Rapid Research

Within a tight timeline, I partnered with MHE and began a deep examination of user-flows, mapping out an ideal conference app framework. The project team's cascading, agile process allowed for simultaneous user experience and creative design, along with concurrent development. Addressing a key content challenge, I designed a completely custom content management system (CMS) that could be easily updated by MHE employees for each event. As a framework for future additions, the CMS offered a robust way to keep event attendees updated in real-time and for administrators to publish content on-the-fly.

A Useful Tool Emerges

The team completed the task (from prototype through deployment) and successfully launched the new MHE Events App just days before the year’s biggest conference event. Over the four-day event, over 90% of the 700+ attendees interacted via the iOS and Android apps. They used it to view individual schedules, review speaker profiles, check live updates, connect with others through profiles, utilzie social media hashtags and download important files.

Since the app’s initial release, I greatly expanded its capabilities through ongoing enhancements and development. Today, event-goers can watch video, listen to audio and attend virtual meetings within the app. Also, all user data is tied into MHE's Salesforce.

How did the app fare?