Our initial thoughts on the event were pretty much spot on, and we achieved what we’d planned.
[caption id="attachment_802" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Scanning the Code"]
[/caption]After Andy’s presentation about the work of the Elevate Team, the event was handed over to David and myself, we started by getting everyone that needed a QR Reader to find and download an app. Then they were handed a map and off they went to find the QR Codes.
There were 20 question, each of which was a single poster created with the Tour Generator. We tweaked the tour template to allow the output to be slightly different from the tour, we have planned to expand on this for the next Tour Sprint, allowing the users to select the type of template they want, are they creating a tour, a treasure hunt etc. Selecting the type would use a different template allowing the printed output to be different.
When the user scans the QR Code for this event, their device loads a mobile friendly web site, with a drop down list for them to select their team name, they then have a choice of 3 options. Once they select their answer and then submits, if they are correct, they score a point that is written to a database. We also had a results page pulling in results from the database every 5 seconds, allowing us to keep a realtime scoreboard.
Below are a couple of screen shots from a mobile device showing the mobile friendly answer page, and the view of selecting the team and the answer:
[caption id="attachment_803" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Selecting the Team"]
[/caption][caption id="attachment_804" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Selecting the Answer"]
[/caption]The teams were due to arrive at Kai’s for lunch after completing the hunt, David and I joined Lynne, Tori, Kirsty and Fiona at Kai, we were keeping an eye on the live scoreboard to see how things were progressing.
As the teams started returning some had used an answer sheets as they’d had a few technical problems (mentioned further down), David and I then set about submitting the hand written answers into the database allowing us to use the scoreboard once the team were ready to announce the winners.
Only 1 team out of 9 hadn’t managed to use their mobile device, they successfully downloaded a reader app,but it crashed the phone and required the owner to remove the battery.
That team along with 2 others were the only ones that used the paper answer sheets, those two teams did manage to use their devices for a number of the questions.
After lunch the winners were announced and the scoreboard was displayed, as seen below:
[caption id="attachment_805" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="The live scoreboard"]
[/caption]The Problems
There were a number of technical issues, most were expected to be honest.
Once the teams were set off to start the hunt, the first 2 codes were within the Waterfront Building, mobile phone signals are not the strongest inside this building, causing the first issue, as the codes required data access to load the webpage. Even though these were optimised mobile friendly pages, they still require data downloads to access.
The next problem was when we advised staff to connect to the wireless, which works across buildings, we advised this specific SSID as we knew they would be entering other buildings. The issue arose with the Wifi as many staff were unsure of using it, they were joining the network, but not being prompted to authenticate before loading their reader app. This then stopped the pages loading, once we’d talked/shown people what to do they went off happy. One exception was a Blackberry owner who was unable to get their phone onto the wireless at all.
A way around the majority of these initial problems would be to have an open unauthenticated wireless network, even if it was heavily firewalled.
Once people were out and about David and I had a quick walk along the route, solving a couple of small niggles, one attendee had 3G switched off on her phone, making loading very, very slow. Another’s device was connecting to a random wifi which we told the device to “forget”, and things were all good after that.
Statistics
We have Google Analytics active on the individual answer pages, we also have Percent Mobile statistics running across the same pages – hopefully giving us more detailed mobile analysis. Below are a quick overview of the stats from today:
[caption id="attachment_806" align="alignnone" width="254" caption="Usage"]
[/caption][caption id="attachment_807" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Accesses by Question"]
[/caption][caption id="attachment_808" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Access by browser type"]
[/caption][caption id="attachment_833" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Accesses by device"]
[/caption][caption id="attachment_828" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Most used devices"]
[/caption]You can see from the “Accesses by browser type” that a number of readers had their own built-in browser, rather than opening up the native device browser.
Today really has shown the potential of what we could create and achieve with this technology. Being able to track and capture statistics really does make this technology much more appealing to other staff around UCS and the wider field.
We will be adding a few questions to the event organisers evaluation, which we will help them create and distribute using Google Docs, we will update the blog once the evaluation forms have been sunmitted.
A good day all round :-)
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