April - User Feedback from Monthly Art Festival Mobile Application
Dylan Phillips
would benefit the group to share my user feedback from last week's Art
Festival.
Jacksonville is a fairly large community, with a bit over a million
people in the metropolitan area, but we do not have a vibrant
downtown. To encourage the population to explore the businesses in
the Urban Core, we hold a monthly Art Festival. Essentially,
businesses, museums, bars and residential high rises host local
artists the first Wednesday of every month. This creates between 30
and 70 Points of Interest within about a square kilometer. What
interested me about the festival was that it allowed me to think of
the space as completely temporal, significantly dense and well
trafficked. I like to say, it's my own little Burning Man. To help
navigate this space, I create a WebKit (no download for either Andriod
or iPhone) based application that lists the Points of Interest.
I hope that the user feedback I've received will benefit this
community.
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- What went well
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-Getting the Word Out:
This month, in order to increase 'buzz' about the application, I
purchased a 3700 Lumen Projector and a 9' 1:1 Screen (<$1000), then I
set up in the park at the middle of the festival. Contrast this to
last month, when I recruited my friends to hand out business cards.
Result == an increase in traffic of nearly 400%. My booth was busy
during the entire festival.
-App Store versus Web Application:
Turns out, we don't lose a ton of features when building HTML5 WebKit
applications as opposed to App Store Applications (Camera and
Accelerometer). What you gain is instant monetization from the
AppStore. What you lose is conversion. By telling users, "Simply
type this URL into your browser," I got 100% conversion, with everyone
I spoke with. And best of all, they won't delete my application
(channel) on Monday when it's no longer useful.
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- What to look out for
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-User Settings in Safari and Android
I had a couple of interesting problems with User Settings in Safari
and Android, but these we the minority. In fact, when I fixed the
settings, my user's thanked me saying, "Gosh, I couldn't figure why
Web Sites looked so bad." Funny things people did:
Android has a setting for 'Load Images', if it's off you get no
indication that images are not displaying. That took a while to track
down.
Android has a setting for 'Default Zoom', this radically affects the
window.innerHeight / .innerWidth: Far {480x731}, Medium {322x544},
Close {240x408}
JavaScript can be turned off, but we are all generally aware of this
issue.
-A bug I can't figure out
On 3 iPhones, users were sending out the XmlHttpRequest, but never
receiving a response. It was happening consistently, and they were
reloading pages, thus they were connected to my back end server. It
was weird, and I'll figure it out before too long.
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- What I need to do better
--------------------------------------
-Mobile Applications are not a good surrogate for a Paper Map, unless
they do something else
Next month I plan to do the following
Integrate with user's FaceBook Social Graph to Mark Location
Maybe have a 'Fog of War' map, (if Gabe wouldn't mind me using that
idea).
-Remember that the Mobile User Experience is Different
The checkin model (or list view) works and should be the default view
of my application. It works because it fits with the Use Case of a
Mobile User. Quick Overview of lots of information. A map takes up a
lot of visual space that is used as a metaphor for the physical
world. But that minimizes the visual space available to provide
contextual information. So hopefully, next month, I'll have some kind
of List View Available.
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- Summary
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Okay that's it. I'll do a new post, next month, to provide feedback
on May's ArtWalk. Let me know if anyone has any cool ideas. Luckily,
for at least the next year I'm on nerd sabbatical. So, I hope to
leverage this forum to challenge my own perceptions, and push my
skills further. If anyone wants to throw out a crazy ideas, by all
means, do.
-Dylan
mapm...@geobispo.com
Thank you for setting up this google group and for the interesting Art Festival post. I'm a big fan of the monthly art walk.
Idea #1: One of the fun aspects (besides the free wine of course) of gallery-hopping is talking about the art with friends. Can you link people's tweets about the art to a specific gallery on your mobile map? This could be the List View you want to make available.
Crazy Idea #2: I and my friends also play a game at art walks, which we call "guess the artist". We look around the gallery and try to figure out who the artist might be. Maybe you could get an artist to wear a some kind of tracking device which you could real-time broadcast on your mobile map. People could try to find the identity of the artist, then try to match the artist with their work. I don't know, just throwing out some ideas for you and others to play with.
I'm looking forward to hearing how your project progresses over the coming year.
Kelli Schonher
www.geobispo.com
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