Wait, what?! Don't you want people using your app? Don't you want them checking in? Isn't the whole point of gamification to encourage engagement? The answer is yes and no.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Mobile Event App Heresy: Three Signs You're Doing It Wrong
Wait, what?! Don't you want people using your app? Don't you want them checking in? Isn't the whole point of gamification to encourage engagement? The answer is yes and no.
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I really like what Schwartz is arguing. I really do. I'm just not sure if you are really going to be able to prevent people from getting distracted from an even based on the type of app you use. Sure if your app has no social media on it, or you find a way to lock social media while lectures or certain events are in session. And I suppose if your app is primarily being used as means to keep information and organization about an event contained to one platform with computer interface (which I really like a lot). At the same time you can't discount the hype or marketing that having the tweets and Facebook check ins and such bring. The amount of recognition that occurs through this is incredibly useful to a company. Also quite frankly I feel that people's issues with smart phones and social will bleed in to an event and/or conference and the same issues will still occur. It just won't be under the guise of an app that the hosts provided/encouraged.
I can get behind most of this. However, speaking from personal experience, I can say that event apps can be incredibly useful regardless of if they have a "gamified" feature. In fact, an app I used for an event that had a photo editing feature where you could add the event logos over the faces in the photo was so absolutely ridiculous that it brought some of us attending the event together while we laughed at it. To me, it kind of sounds like Schwartz is saying a whole lot about nothing. It takes an incredible amount of time and resources to develop an app, even if it is as temporary as for one event. Most companies are not going to be spending that kind of time and resources to develop an app with a ton of excess features just for the sake of being "up with the times".
This article was well written and insightful into a world I know almost nothing about - event apps. It makes sense that the apps should not be overly distracting, lest they distract from your event. It seems to me, however, that people will likely use other social network to connect and check in anyway, and therefore it would be advantageous to you as an event organizer to open up connections to these platforms from your own app so as to keep your attendees focused on your content as well, rather than jumping back and forth.
This reminds me of a presentation that was a part of the School of Art Lecture Series this past Tuesday by Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald. Melding their interests together, their work has become one of technology mixed with social interaction. One of their recent collaborations was at the TED 2014 conference. When you went into the installation, you put in your twitter account. The installation bombarded you with text and images from your feed and tweets and then morphed into the same information from someone else's twitter who was at the conference. At the end it revealed who that person was and encouraged you to go find them. Many people did follow through and it was a really great way to intimately connect with someone else instead of cursory new friendships. It's certainly a great alternative to a basic app as this article discusses. https://vimeo.com/90547410
What Schwartz says makes sense from a design perspective. It sounds like it should be obvious, but I can also understand wanting to keep people at the event. But Schwartz is right because keeping people longer without it being productive/useful time. And to answer what Brennan said about companies not putting in the time, but they do. So what Schwartz says is true, but I like what Michael brought up with the TED Talk app, that is definitely the way to go.
This article makes some really good points. I personally have not had much personal experience with event apps, but what the author is saying does make sense, in that if you are creating such an app it should not distract from the event itself. However, I think that oftentimes, people's distraction from their current surroundings are self-caused. Even without an event-specific app, there would be many people on their phones checking some social media or another. That said, it should still of course be a goal for app developers to keep their creations as timely as possible.
It feels to me as if Schwartz is saying that an event app must be either engaging and helpful or distracting and gimmicky, and ne'er the two shall meet. I rather wonder what has gotten him so riled up about "traditional" event apps? Was he at a conference where everyone was so involved in their check-in games that their networking was truly hampered? How could a truly engaging conference have such an addictive app that the majority of useful networking time was spent in such a manner? Unless this "gamification" included conference candy-crush or something, this all feels like a bit of an overstatement.
Yes, a desktop interface etc. with preparation materials would be a fabulous addition to an event app, but it's also helpful to look back over "check-ins" and find that super cool colleague whom you've never met and lost their business card. Conferences sound at once incredibly stressful and tedious sometimes, where you're always professionally "on" and trying to make a good impression. Just because an app includes a bit of fancy doesn't mean it's useless hogwash indicative of the techno-addiction of those useless Millenials.
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