What do I want in a conference website? Not this.
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I want to be able to browse sessions to find the ones I’m interested in. That means being able to see the session title and time as well as the speakers and talk titles. A super-long web page is perfectly fine.
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If you can’t show me everything at once, at least let me click-to-expand: for the talk titles, and then for the abstracts. Otherwise I have to keep clicking and going back.
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I want to be able to search for people. And if I’m searching for Hao Wu, I don’t want to look at all of the Wus. Or all of the Haos. I just want the Hao Wus. If I can’t search on
"Hao Wu", at least let me search on"Wu, Hao". -
If my search returns nothing and I go back, bring me back to the same search form. Don’t make me have to click “Search for people” again.
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I’d like to be able to form a schedule of the sessions to attend. (JSM2015 does that okay, but it’s not what I’d call “secure” and you have to find the damned things, first.) Really, I want to pick particular talks: this one in that session and that one in the other. But yeah, that seems a bit much to ask.
The JSM 2015 site is so terrible for browsing, I was happy to get the pdf of the program. (Good luck finding it on the website on your own; ASA tweeted the link to me, due to my bitching and moaning.) You can browse the pdf. That’s the way I ended up finding the sessions I wanted to attend. It also had an ad for the JSM 2015 mobile app. Did you know there was one? Good luck finding a link to that on their website, either.
The pdf is useable, but much like the website, it fails to make use of the medium. I want:
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Bookmarks. I want to jump to where Monday’s sessions start without have to flip through the whole thing.
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Hyperlinks. If you don’t include the abstracts, with links from the talk titles to the abstracts, at least include links to the web page that has the abstract so I don’t have to search on the web.
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More hyperlinks. The pdf has an index, with people and page numbers. Why not link those page numbers to the corresponding page?
I helped organize a small meeting in 2013. The program on the web and the corresponding pdf illustrate much of what I want. (No scheduling feature, but that meeting had no simultaneous sessions.) I included gratuitous network graphs of the authors and abstracts. It’s 2015. No conference site is truly complete without interactive network graphs.
Update
As Thomas Lumley commented below, if you search on “Wu” you get all of the “Wu"s but also there’s one “Wulfhorst”. And if you search on “Hao” you get only people whose last name is “Hao”.
He further pointed out that if you search for the affiliation “Auckland” the results don’t include “University of Auckland” but only “Auckland University of Technology”. And actually, if you search for “University of Auckland” you get nothing. You need to search for “The University of Auckland”.