(continuation of “my.SXSW: How NOT to make a Conference App for iPhone”)

First, just how bad *is* my.SXSW? Is this just a bunch of whiners, as the my.SXSW developer seemed to think?

App Store Ratings

Currently 2 stars, out of 5.

This is a conference app for SXSW … it ought to be work of simple beauty, a crafted piece of design with great usability – an easy 4.5 stars. As one commenter noted, there’s hundreds of designers and developers who live in Austin who’d gladly have contributed to make it so, if they’d been given the chance. They weren’t (apparently).

…and here I want to chip-in with something from the post-mortem. Chris Bucchere (I think) pointed out that the conference organizers have had recurring problems with the “polish” part of their online/digital presentation for years. Where some tech conferences these days already have highly tested and robust tech architectures, it sounds like SXSW’s tech is still new and rapidly evolving. So, that would make any developer’s job much harder.

I sympathise with a developer who takes on a project too big for them. It hurts. But if you can’t/won’t take steps to fix it, and it means the end product sucks, then I’m afraid you have to live with that, and admit your failure.

App Store Comments

Let’s look at the comments… (NB: you can switch to different countries via the dropdown on the linked page)

• “So horrible I took the time to wrote this.”
• “Extremely buggy, slow & unstable … I can’t believe this is the best sxsw can do.”
• “This app is a piece of s*%#! Thanks for nothing, it’s easier to grab a chronicle and go through it by hand.”
• “Oh the irony- you guys are supposed to be on the cutting edge of tech, right? FIX IT.”
• “I’m dying to use this app but I HATE DUB right now. ”
• “Forms won’t submit when you hit search. Can’t find “Williams” or “Casey” keynotes!”
• “Use mobile website. It’s way faster. ”
• “App constantly crashes and is very buggy. ”
• “For me the deal breaker is the fact that search does not work. The UI is also non intuitive. Too bad b/c this would have been really helpful if better executed as prctically everybody here at sxsw has an iX device.”
• “Sweet idea, very useful for sorting through tons of events….when it works. Crashes at some point every time I use it.”
• “For what’s supposed to be a time saver, phenominally slow and hard to use. ”
• “App is a thrown together waste of time.”
• ” Crashes immediately on 3gs iPhone.”
• “Give me an option to sign up for dub and then mandate it? Crash with every other launch? Don’t remember which track I selected causing me to waste ten seconds with this slow app each time I launch it? Nice job. Wish there was a Sched app.”
• [ ... and many more in a similar vein]

Developer scrambles to fix it, right? … Right?

Wrong. I went to the post-mortem during the conference. The developer feels that “9 out of 10 people complaining are just blowing off steam”. They apparently don’t understand what’s wrong with the app, and they’ve been welcoming people to explain in more simple terms what needs changing.

I am grateful for the insights they shared (although a lot of it was basic low-level professionalism – I mean, seriously, they “forgot” to test the app before pushing an update? Yikes). However … personally, I think they shouldn’t have given the talk.

They should have spent that hour fixing the app and rushing through an update with Apple as fast as possible. It might have been only a small improvement, but from this starting point, anything would have been better than nothing.

Honest, transparency, and … fake reviews?

This is dangerous ground; professional iphone developers are well aware that this behaviour can get your apps pulled from the App Store. (google it for examples if you’ve not seen any yourself).

It also makes the consumer in me pretty angry – I don’t like being lied to. If you write a crap product, admit it and suck it down. Don’t react by assuming that your consumers are all stupid, and have your employees or PR agency go online and “pretend” to be a happy customer. Congrats, “megab” (suspiciously close to a schill for Dub?):

NB: I have no evidence of who megab is / is not – I’m merely pointing out the suspicious nature. I leave it up to you to decide. Read the comments for yourself:

Wow! This app is great! So such information and so easy to use. Can’t wait for SXSW!!

This user only reviewed three apps. Two of those are for the same company (Dub), and are 5 star, the third is for an arguably-rival company (Bump) and is 1 star.

Oh, and by the way – this is against Apple’s terms and conditions. Decent companies don’t do this.

Out of all the reviews, every single one panned the app, except this and one other. And the other listed a bunch of problems. This reivew almost sounded like it came from a different app entirely .

Developer response

In summary … this is a really bad iPhone app. I haven’t seen a mainstream app that was this bad for a long time – I can’t remember anything within the last 12 months.

But I’d like to add that I’m impressed by the openness and tolerance of the developer – especially Chris Bucchere. Faced with such an avalanche of criticism and outright hatred, he’s doing well at remaining civil. From what I’ve seen, he’s genuinely trying to engage with the people providing complaints.

Part 3: what should you do?

EDIT: I didn’t intend to tweet this post – I forgot that auto-tweeting was setup on this blog – so I’m still writing the final part (concrete suggestions for conference app design). I’ll post it ASAP and edit-in the link here!

SXSWi has a bit of a reputation, people expecting it to be the scene of ultra-high-profile tech launches. Simple, attractive, easy-to-use products that capture a huge market. Like … Twitter (launched at SXSWi 2007), or Gowalla (SXSWi 2009).

So, in the debut year for the conference’s own, bespoke, conference app, we were expecting something good. We hoped for something great. At the very least, we knew we’d get something … that worked.

It wasn’t to be. In the words of one twitter user:

The my.SXSW iPhone app sucks freeze-dried donkey bollocks.

Rogue Amoeba (the guys who managed to effect a change to Apple’s app-rejection policies) reviewed just the “schedule” part of the app:

if you’re going to make an application for thousands of designers and developers, it probably shouldn’t suck.

There are many more issues … but you’ve seen enough. Let’s just log out.

Thoughts from an iPhone Developer…

I’m an iPhone developer, and the my.SXSW app makes me shudder. There’s so much about it that betrays a basic lack of experience and awareness of how to make iPhone apps.

I’m also in the unusual position that I recently planned out a conference app for a different conference, although we didn’t go ahead with it. And for friends and colleagues, I collaborated on a hobby project to make a Party Finder app for conferences, which contains a lot of the elements of a full conference app.

It’s a lot of work to make a conference app. It’s not rocket-science – you’re just doing standard UX design, and standard, derivative coding – but there’s a *lot* of coding and testing and iteration to do, just to get a minimal product.

Even so I’m still bitterly disappointed in the SXSWi app. Any decent iPhone team could/should/would have made something so much better.

The funny thing is that the SXSWi app is so bad that it actually inspired us to make the app we built. I don’t know what will happen with our app – it was a hobby project, unpaid, and we’ve so far just shared it with friends and colleagues.

But in the meantime, I’ll go through some of what I believe you SHOULD do with a conference app…

…Continue reading with part 2: how bad is my.SXSW, really?

my.SXSW is the “official” app for this year’s South By Southwest conference in Austin, TX. SXSW is a huge conference for the world’s web developers, designers, entrepreneurs, etc. Interesting post-mortem today by the guys who built the app.

Up-front, I’d like to say this: the guys who made the app seem like nice people who took on a difficult job, and put lots of effort into it. My impression is that they tried really hard to make something good. Unfortunately, it seems that the design and coding required was way way too much for them – they assumed that “iphone development” was just like “web development”. One of the recurring conversations I’ve heard this year has been hate directed towards their product by the end-users, which must be very upsetting for them.

Personally, I was hugely disappointed by the app. During this week, most of the iPhone users I’ve seen have chosen to NOT use the official app for at least one of its core features, and use other, non-affiliated, apps instead, because the official one was so terrible.

Here’s a quote from one of the users of this app:

“The my.sxsw iphone app sucks freeze-dried donkey bollocks”

The guys that developed this app for the conference showed this in their post-mortem talk today, and they were good-humoured about it. That takes some bravery on its own.

But at the same time it felt like they were simply in denial. Their accompanying comment was that 90% of all people complaining about the app were “just letting off steam”.

Huh? Two things:

1. Have they never worked with online communities before? (sounds like the answer is “no”)

I’m amazed that anyone in this industry would still dismiss community reaction like that. It’s patronising and flies in the face of what we already know about community (and have known for more than a decade).

2. Complainers *hate* this app. It’s meant to make their conference experience better, and they don’t “dislike it”, they “hate” it. That should be a massive wake-up call! Apparently not…

As a user, and watching other people using it, I noticed two main problems / complaints:

• The app is pathologically hard to use. There is (seemingly) zero effort on user-interface design. There is loads of classic “bad practice” in UX. The app repeatedly ignores / stamps on the established paradigms of the iPhone itself (do the developers not own ANY other iPhone apps? Have they never used an iPhone?).
• The core app features don’t work. One of the most important featuers – the map – is missing the street names. This is on the iPhone, where Apple and Google provide *free*, high-quality Google Maps. The map itself is ugly, low-resolution, badly-scanned graphics

Tragically, if the developers had simply used Apple’s default widgets and graphics, the app would have been less ugly and easier to use in several places. In those particular cases, the visual design was worse than if there’d been none at all.

Fine, it’s disappointing. But … why all the hate?

I suspect it’s because the developers just hacked together an app that worked for them, without knowing much about app design or development. That might work for a small client who doesn’t care much about image or end-quality, but … Sadly, they went and did this at a conference filled with tens of thousands of professional graphic designers, UX designers, marketing people, and programmers. Duh.

It was a slap in the face to the very thing that these people do and live and breath on a day to day basis. An audience member in the post-mortem, sounding pretty frustrated, came out with this:

In this city, there are hundreds of unemployed highly-skilled web and mobile programmers, why didn’t you work with any of them?

At the end of the day, this is a great illustration of why so many digital companies are struggling to succeed on iPhone: not enough effort put into matching the app with the audience. What does the audience want? What do they expect? And how much skill is required to develop that?

Let’s see what they come out with next year. As a professional iPhone developer, thinking about what I’d have done for the conference (and we recently presented a pitch for a different conference, so I have a good idea what’s feasible) I *really* hope they employ a local iPhone studio to develop the app next time. A team that does nothing but iPhone apps could make something awesome…