“You ruined my experience!”

Conference Attendee UX: What Works and What Fails

In my previous post, I promised to share my user experience with innovations in the language industry -- both as a provider and a consumer of interpreting and translation services. This is the first article in the series.

My late mother-in-law was a larger-than-life firecracker packed into a diminutive 5’3’ frame. Her most memorable one-liner still echoes through our family. During a board game, when someone dared to point out her mistake, this fiercely competitive matriarch exclaimed, “Thanks a lot! You ruined my experience!”

Recently, at an in-person academic event, I found myself wanting to shout the very same words “You ruined my experience!  I had paid thousands of dollars, flown across continents, left work and family behind, and for what? Listening to presenters reading their convoluted research articles word for word in merely comprehendible English, heads buried in the page?  Respect your audience, man!”

Then I noticed something curious. Many of my fellow attendees were glued to their phones, and not out of boredom but because they were reading the text of the very same presentation translated into their own languages (with good quality and synchronized with the spoken segments, to be fair).

All speakers were asked to submit their speeches in advance, which is a sound practice. However, they were also instructed not to deviate from the script while delivering their presentations. This was the organizers’ way of saving on conference interpreting services.

Was it worth it? Not in my book.

Have you ever tried watching a movie in a language you don’t understand, relying entirely on subtitles? Most of your attention is consumed by reading and keeping pace with the text, trying to sync it with the actors’ voices and intonations. Meanwhile, the visuals, the setting, the characters’ expressions and body language slip past unnoticed. The full cinematic experience simply isn’t there.

The same goes for international forums.

We attend scholarly and scientific conferences to encounter cutting-edge research and fresh, even unorthodox ideas. Sitting through hours of keynotes and breakouts, absorbing new concepts requires focus and significant cognitive effort. That effort becomes almost unbearable when presenters read their papers word-for-word, deliver in a nonnative language without sufficient command of its pronunciation and cadence, or when the audience is left without access to simultaneous interpretation into a language they understand. Faced with this overload, people simply tune out.

If you take away participants’ joy and excitement of unhindered learning, why bother with hosting a conference at all? Did the organizers really think that “reading along,” steering clear of panel discussions, and limiting Q&As only to those who spoke the presenter’s language would pass as good enough?

Now, would providing a text-to-speech automated reading alongside the translated text on attendees’ phones improve the user experience in this situation? Somewhat. It would at least allow them to look at the presenter rather than stare at their screens. But it would not make up for the absence of a natural, conversational delivery, nor would it support effective Q&A sessions.

Am I just a spoiled veteran “conferencer” who expects that her investment of time, attention, and money will be rewarded with insightful, stimulating, original content delivered in an engaging way? Perhaps. Don’t take me wrong. A gen-Xer, I cringe at excessive showmanship, preaching, or pontificating. But being subjected to a flat, lifeless delivery is no picnic either.

From the user experience viewpoint, there is still no substitute for skilled conference interpreters who are given the opportunity to properly prepare and provided with suitable working conditions. And knowing the price range for developing and deploying conference apps, I doubt that cutting interpreters brought any significant savings.

At the end of the day, international conferences exist to spark ideas, foster collaboration, and bring people together across borders and languages. If we forget that, we risk reducing them to little more than expensive reading exercises. Engaging speakers, captivating content, well facilitated discussions, competent interpreters, and thoughtful use of technology are not luxuries. They are the very tools that make global exchange meaningful.