I’m an old git who likes his music festivals, from the Big Day Out to Womad. Over the years I’ve had some pretty frustrating experiences with mobile (phone and pda) based applications that come oh so close to being useful. Furthermore, I had the pleasure this week of hanging out with some very bright people from mobilizy (who bring us WikiTude) and google (who bring us more than we can digest). If nothing else, designing the ultimate mobile app for festivals might stop me punching the next person in the face who answers their phone in the mosh and asks ‘where are you’!!!
If a single app combined the features/possibilities of three recent expereinces it would be doing well. Consider this post an ‘open specification’ to seed ideas and get discussion going.
- Big day out flash app for symbian phones (2008). The cool thing here was hackability – by editing an XML file in notepad, I was able to create a timetable for WomAdelaide 2009 from this app created for an entirely different festival. This kind of extensibility or hackability is key in designing for emergent behaviour or unintended uses.
- WomAdelaide iPhone app (the late version with AR). I actually used the Augmented Reality (AR) scope on the Map to find the ‘sirens’ installation that was tucked away in a hidden place, at night, while it was turned off due to rain! But… on the down-side the timetable data was buggy and locked into the app (not easily hackable – or fixable). Also the functionality of the app was not even close to that of the old Big Day Out flash app.
- 4Square, WikiTude & Google Goggles. I had an ephiphany with WikiTude on iPhone when I pointed it to a door in my back yard and found a picture of my son playing guitar in that exact door-way. Combine this with the ability to create places in 4Square for unusual sites (like various stages at a festival).
Some key features I’d like to see:
- AR Scope style view of where ‘my friends’ are. This is the killer end-point.
- Extensibility (or hackability) see above. Help the street find cool uses for things.
- Separate data from function. Make it easy to do minor corrections / tweaks without download entire update.
- PC based planning – define my social networks, connect up my tweets, facebook etc before I go (clumsy to do on mobile at event)
- PC based stats – great to be able to create a list of date, time, place & notes. (e.g. which stages I visited, what acts I saw)
- Much Much more (to come in updates…)
technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang
[...] Read the complete article on Mike Seyfang’s blog. [...]