After having spent more than 11 years in the Microsoft camp of application development building primarily enterprise applications, I chose to spend my summer 2010 learning the Google Android Operating System and Framework, the Java Framework, and, of course, get inspired about new ways to make applications, at the Mittuniversitetet university in Sweden.
As part of my course I had to do a project, and I chose to develop an application for Android phones that I had wanted to have in my hand last year: An application for the Malmö cultural and music festival. I remembered my experience from the previous year, where I was able to study their concerts on their site all I wanted, but once I were amongst the many visitors and the many scenes, I was hard to find my way and remember where to go and where the scenes are. To me, the festival needed a more "local" guide, of course taking use of the latest technology available to most people now (here GPS and mobile data network).
So I made it my mission to create such an application! In case you missed it during the festival, you can see the result below in this application walkthrough:
The following screen was the start screen of the application. From there the user could go to "Just now and upcoming events", "Festival map", "Scenes and Places", "Your favorites", and search.
This screen showed the contents of the "Just now and upcoming events" window. It showed current and the two next events, sorted by scene.
The next screen showed the festival scenes on a map. The pins were clickable, and gave the user access to information by the given scene, including all the concerts on that scene.
This next screen showed a different way to access scenes, as a simple list. Again, clicking on the scene would take the user to detailed information about the scene, including all the events.
The screen below showed a detailed view of a concert. The user could share the event on every media possible in the mobile phone, such as Twitter, Facebook, Mail, SMS and more. Even better, the user could also press the heart in the upper right corner, which would then light up and add the concert to her/his favorites list.
The screen below showed the users favorite event list. The user would get a reminder about the concerts in the favorite list 30 minutes before the concerts begin. Super nice, when you were browsing the stands on the festival or got carried away in conversation! :)
The features above were the most significant in the application. I had some really good feedback from the people who downloaded and used it. 4,5 stars out of 5 possible! Futhermore, the great people at malmofestivalen.se caught on to the application and after a short coffee meeting, we decided to create an import feature, which would make it possible to transfer the favorites from the web site into the Android application. By doing so, the users would get the best of both worlds: a rich web interface to create favorites and a local application to remind the user and show where the concert took place. The application had about 1000 active users, which might not be much compared to the amount of visitors, but it still was quite a surprise to even have that much popularity.
If you are considering to get an application created for your company or organization, I would be more than happy to add my detailed experience and help that application come to life in the best possible way. Bringing the application above to the end users gave me insight on many details that you might be able to use, from application life cycle management, support and communication with end users, and also how to get data for visitor analytics.
Feel free to drop me a line here!