Comments on: Usability Nightmare: The My.SXSW iPhone App

By: Carlo

Carlo — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:02:53 +0000

Why was this an app at all? Why not a mobile web site open to any device?

By: Nicholas Shaff

Nicholas Shaff — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:53:23 +0000

Couldn’t agree more, I ditched the SXSW app about two days in and instead used sitby.us. The SXSW app wasn’t catching everything I signed up for on the web and the radio button thing had me confused for a bit before I figured it out by looking at an event I’d already selected to attend. The constant slow reloading of the entire list got on my nerves quickly.

Sitby.us was faster, cleaner and much easier to work with on my 2G iPhone the whole weekend.

By: Chris Hopkinson

Chris Hopkinson — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:58:14 +0000

We understand the issues folks had and really do appreciate the constructive feedback. There’s a lot of other people’s tech in the app (my.sxsw, sxsw and Mapquest), which always complicates things.

I supposed we could’ve shelved the app entirely, but we wouldn’t have learned much from a user perspective. I’m confident, given the feedback we received and having longer than a two months to integrate and build, next year’s app will be better.

Thanks!

Chris Hopkinson
chris@dubmenow.com

By: Fabien

Fabien — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:22:48 +0000

Those shouldn’t be apps. They should be mobile websites using html5. At least it would work on any mobile. The app itself does not bring anything.

By: Scott Macrae

Scott Macrae — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:59:12 +0000

Usable: Sitby.us
Not: My.SXSW

By: Karl Adam

Karl Adam — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:55:48 +0000

You’re being generous in regards to how bad this application is. I went ahead and downloaded the MIX10 application and surprisingly, it’s built using C# and .NET using the MonoTouch tookit, and is head and shoulders far better than the my.SXSW application.

By: Mike2

Mike2 — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:12:41 +0000

Compare this with the conference that was built for the Mix conference (MIX10 on the AppStore) which made it easy to find sessions by topic, by time slot, by speaker, provided maps of the rooms and the city as well as an easy way of registering which talks you were attending.

The home screen is also useful as the conference develops, it shows the current sessions happening now, and upcoming conferences

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:11:54 +0000

It gets worse – looks like there are schill commenters (employees of Dub?).

Screencaps taken, will post blog link in a followup…

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:13:20 +0000

“building mobile apps ARE hard?” Objective-C isn’t the only language they have trouble with, it seems…

By: Paul Kafasis

Paul Kafasis — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:33:31 +0000

Megan V: If it worked for you, great. But for me and many others, it was so problematic that it was worse than not having an app at all.

Ross Hill: It’s not exactly our problem space, but I’d certainly take an hour or two to test out next year’s app, and provide a useful critique ahead of time.

Chris Hopkinson: Glad to hear from you! I’ll be interested to see next year’s app, as there’s certainly the potential for this to be very useful. This year, however, the app just didn’t cut it for many folks.

Florian Albrecht: Ouch. There are lots of “edge cases” (time zones, international users) which I’d bet are hitting hundreds of people, large percentages of attendees. It’s certainly not an easy problem, but many potential improvements are both obvious and needed.

bud: Well, I used it for Film as well, and didn’t get any more out of it.

As far as features, what I’d like is the schedule, useful maps (of each venue), and actually, what SitBy.Us had – info on where my friends are. It doesn’t seem to have any way to share contact info (which would be smart), no messaging, no truly current news that I saw.

You said “It isn’t unusual for an app meant for a specific use to not necessarily fit as well as a more general app might.” I find that interesting. I think a specifically tailored app, for SXSW, would be the best possibility. It could be fully tailored to SXSW. From that, you might also be able to extract a general app, to be used elsewhere.

cm: Not exactly. There’s a companion app, to go with a conference which costs a good deal of money to attend. It’s an official part of SXSW, and thus, paid for, indirectly.

As far as using it every day for months? No. But I’ve used SitBy.us every day for this week, quite a bit. It’s not a minor thing, for attendees.

slimjim: You nailed it – it was intended to make things easier, but wound up being problematic enough that using it was harmful. Hopefully, SXSW 2011 will be better.