Designing a calmer conference agenda

Every conference board starts the same way: a giant spreadsheet of rooms, tracks, and half-confirmed speakers. The goal of our agenda grid was never to replicate that spreadsheet — it was to let an attendee walk in on day one, glance at the board once, and know what they want to go to.

That meant being ruthless about visual weight. We stripped shadows off the session cards, collapsed adjacent borders to a single 1px seam, and fixed the hour row height tall enough that a session title never crops.

One grid, many days

On desktop we show every day side by side so you can scan the whole program at once. On mobile we snap to one day per viewport and let you swipe — same data, different ergonomics.

The trickier bit was scroll behavior. The agenda should open near the first real session, not at a pristine 00:00. We scroll to roughly 10 pixels above the earliest card so the top of the schedule always feels intentional.

The interested star

The smallest control on the page is an inline SVG star. It toggles on click, lives in an in-memory store, and stays in sync between the board and the detail modal. No database writes — yet. Sometimes the most satisfying feature is the one you deliberately keep simple.