FoWC2010 Mobile Website
Drinkaware.ie and the Festival of World Cultures came together to help promote the safe consumption of alcohol during the festival period. After some discussion it was decided to produce a mobile version of the festival website (as opposed to an expensive and device-specific iPhone application). This site’s function was to enable festival goers to find out information about the festival quickly and easily using a mobile device and at the same time learn about the safe and responsible consumption of alcohol.
The current (we like to say) hysteria about iPhone apps has helped to hide the fact that they are time consuming and costly to develop, are tied into proprietary Apple development technologies and of course will only work on an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. As great as the iPhone is we certainly don’t agree with limiting an audience to one specific device.
We wanted to develop something that was accessible to everyone, regardless of what kind of mobile device or phone the person was viewing the site on. So we ditched the iPhone app approach and instead developed a mobile website that worked on many more phones than just the iPhone and used a RESTful design approach to reduce duplication of data. In English, this means any information already on the standard festival website could be re-used to populate the mobile site dynamically. This meant festival staff could control the content of the mobile site by simply editing the content on the desktop website.
The key features of the mobile website were:
A Homepage – which features Festival Highlights (identified by FoWC) that appeared dynamically based on time. The homepage also featured links to Browse the Programme, General Search and the Festival Guide (search for events by location, search events by time).
Time-based search. Users could quickly and easily see what is on now, in the next hour, next few hours and later. This approach reduced the requirement of user input and allowed the user to quickly access upcoming event information.
Related events. Users could see events related to other events. For example, a user might have left a show and wanted to see other events in the vicinity or on at that time that were related to what they just saw.
Location based search. A map of the festival was displayed split into a grid. A user could see all events on in a specific area. They could then refine the list of events in that area by what’s on now, later etc. as well as by venues in that area
General festival information. Key event info was also accessible on the site and was dynamically displayed based on what was on the current website. If any information was changed on the live site, the mobile site would reflect this also.
The mobile site proved to be a great success with just over 10,000 visits over 3 days. Plans for 2011’s mobile site include using the Senscha user interface framework to ensure a more fluid user experience and to develop the location and time-based searches using native device geo-location and GPS functionality.