SXSW® GO - 2023 Event Guide Hack 16.3 + Redeem Codes

PLEASE, just let me open the app to the last thing I was looking at! Every time I open it it takes me back to home page where I have to click on the “go to schedule” button, tap on my schedule, tap on the date, and scroll down. It would be great if the app would just open on the last thing you were looking at! Sure, serve me the same yellow jackets ad I’ve seen a million times already but please don’t make me start over every time I open the app!!! Also the search should be optimized a bit to include any word/person/place of the sessions. For instance, I would search “ballroom D” and random things would pop up but not the room page where I can see the sessions that will happen there. Hope this is helpful!

The UX is so messed up on this app. Menu items are confusing: Schedule, Today, My Favorites seem to be versions of the same thing. Seeing just films or just bands is under Lists A-Z. You can filter by tags but not by venue, by date or by time. Sometimes the schedule shows my favorited items, sometimes not. Sometimes essential info runs off screen on my small phone. Events Nearby opens a “link my badge” window that is impossible to exit. It took me 4 days to find out there was a shuttle tracker. Two stars because it runs on both my iPad and my ancient iPhone. It would be better if you could rate 1st choice, 2nd choice, etc for events at same time, or place events on the map so you could plan things near each other. But Schedule functions well (I like the “free time” feature when there’s a gap in schedule).

With all the interactive and tech focus of SXSW the app should really work better than this.

Latest Update:
- deleted the app completely. Downloaded again as noticed they had done update for iPhonex. Seems to be working much better now on the issues.

My current list of issues - I run app on iphoneX:
- can’t update profile pic - missing feature
- won’t save favourites of anything as lose it on next sync
- planned schedule on website instead and expected it to sync to app - doesn’t
- filters don’t work - can’t move sliders
- slow performance
- rsvp doesn’t work

Basically app is useless for its most critical purpose and that is helping to plan the experience we pay for at SXSW. I now revert to paper guide and using iCal sync from the website scheduler. The only thing I use for is venue addresses.

Hard to believe given this is a design and engineering conference. This app simple hasn’t been tested.

This app is useful. It’s easier to access than the web schedule.

Although the functionality is limited (hard to scroll, slow response, can’t search by location) it’s actually one of the best conference apps since most conference apps are horrible.

However, the app has many, many ads. Every time you launch, there’s a non -skippable ad. My device is a bit old (6S) and this takes 5 seconds. It’s the same ad for Showtime. I’m already a subscriber. You can’t turn this off. It takes 5 seconds to load and tap “skip ad.”

When you’re browsing the schedule, there’s a non-skippable banner ad with 15-20% of the screen. Again for showtime. With the other navigation wrapper, this means you can only see 3-4 items and scrolling is jerky. This means when you swipe you go past where you want.

This conference is paid. I understand trying to get some ad revenue, but it’s worsening your user experience. Comically, there are dozens of sessions with great designers about design. There’s probably some SXSW employee weeping at having to sacrifice design principles for the release of this app.

I would prefer just a giant pdf and text search (not available).

Oh yeah, the capacity feature is neat, but not very accurate or useful. Although I don’t think this is a flaw in the app. Likely the data capture and estimate.

...is this App.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when it works - up to the minute information about the schedule, suggestions about what conferences to attend, up to the minute line “status”

But it frustrating to use a frustrating amount of the time, specially for a conference that is supposed to be for interactives, I’d expect better execution!

Scrolling the list is constantly wonky, going into a detail page and then back to the list you loose your place, or events show up multiple times - creating an infinite scroll affect.

If you’re playing audio in the app, the layering makes some of it unusable.

When loading detail pages sometimes it crashes out within the app and the detail page goes away and returns me back to the start of the app, loosing my place and forcing me to search again.

The express pass is a nice idea, but I only got it to work once after being there for a week and trying at 9am the day prior as instructed.

Easier filtering would be nice - maybe some way to scan the “hotter” discussions than the weaker ones. You’re often deciding between a dozen sessions at the same time that you want to attend - would be great if there was a way to compare them with some metadata to help aid in decision making

1. The red/yellow/green indicators don’t help. The event staff controlling the door/line for each session should really be able to manually change the indicator to yellow & red based on the line ups they are seeing before a session starts. If I see a green indicator 20min before a session and run across downtown to get there only to find there is a line up equal to double the room capacity - that’s a serious failure in communication. If the door staff had changed it to red when they knew the rooms capacity was lined up in the hall, then I would know it wasn’t worth hustling across town to try and make it.

2. The location services really need to include maps inside each building showing where the rooms are. And it also needs step by step navigation / direction so the people can quickly find the rooms they are seeking.

User experience on this app is awful. There’s no way to stop seeing items that you’ve looked at and don’t want to attend so you have to keep scrolling past them as you look for new stuff you might want to see. Many of the companies that are here are not listed as exhibitors even tho they have a major Presence here. Example Twitter - not listed but they have a Twitter house - why?
Was overall very disappointed in the app given that this is SxSW - expectations for cool tech are high. I saw better venue apps at the national retail federation and others. Given how this event is spread out all over Austin it is imperative to have an app that helps navigate. Although your map feature is nice. Would be nice to be able to see on a map what you’ve favorited so you can tell if you can get from one to the next easily.

You can no longer select the type of event (e.g. film screening) easily from the filter. You can go in and select every single film category and get the same thing.

You can no longer filter by venue. Further, each screen in Alamo is listed as a unique venue, so if you just navigate to a specific venue schedule you have to view each screen in isolation.

As a local, I typically purchase a film wristband and attend whatever’s at Alamo South Lamar. An ideal user flow is, open app, filter by venue, then filter by date, then go through the line up to determine the preferred films for the day. What used to be an easy process now requires me to copy paste and reorganize info from the app to get a complete picture of options at any given time.

Content organization is still confusing and app is buggy. It isn’t properly syncing my favorites from my tablet—only some of them, so I don’t have a complete schedule with me. The list of events is also unwieldy and difficult to scan six lines at a time—it doesn’t scale for the growth of the content. Then it reloads every time a schedule update completes, losing my place! Links with more info for event descriptions don’t actually like anywhere, and the full-page recommendations cards are slow to load and a pain to scroll through. After all these years, why is this app still so problematic?

All the information is here, but Search is missing some very obvious filters. I can’t look up musical acts by genre. I can’t filter results down to the ones available for the pass I bought. It’s very hard to narrow the hundreds of options down to plan my week.

Also, there are workers scanning people’s badges and wristbands when we enter the venues. But every show is showing green (low capacity) … they’re collecting the attendance data but the app isn’t using it.

It’s basically a decent app, I can work with it, but it’s inconvenient in some pretty obvious ways.