Thirst Notes

An iPad should not be used as a till at an outdoor bar by the sea. This isn’t a moan piece…just a log really, about my experiences with a very expensive and poorly executed user experience, and what I’ve learned from it.

I went to Primavera this year. it’s a three day music festival in Barcelona. It’s always sponsored by a big drinks brand. In previous years this has been Estrella Damm, but this year was San Miguel. If I was San Miguel, I’d be pretty hacked off this year.

In order to minimise cash losses over the bar, you usually have to buy a load of vouchers that you then use to get your water or beer or spirits. Bear in mind that you’re not allowed to bring anything in with you. Not even water. Aside from that, the analogue solution of branded vouchers the size of raffle tickets worked just fine.

This year, prior to arriving at the festival (but after having brought a ticket), you had to register for an account at the Primavera online ‘Portal’. Once you’d done this, you got a six digit pin number that you were asked to memorise. It wasn’t e-mailed to you, and they shall say this only once. Then you linked your bank account to your Portal account, so that you could top it up with currency to be used at the festival.

When you arrive at the festival you get your usual festival wristband, and also a card with a QR code on it. Next, you either go to a festival stall to have your card linked to your Portal account after giving someone your six-digit pin – or you do this with your smart phone. There’s only one problem – the Wireless Network access at the festival is shot from the word go. So you queue up even though you have a smart phone like they told you to bring. The queue is nearly an hour long, but you queue, and you miss the first band that you came to see. But it’s okay, because once you’ve done this you’ll be able to get a drink. You’re on holiday, you’re at a festival, you’re hot and bothered. You deserve one.

Meanwhile you call someone in England and see if they can do this thing for you on the internet. Only the Primavera website seems to be down for them. Uh-oh.

Finally, your QR card gets linked to your online Portal account by a guy with a thing in a booth. You head to the bar.

There are over a thousand people in the queue for the bar. So you go to another one. There are after all about thirty of them around the site. You find one with a normal sized queue, and see no drinks. They’re not serving people, except security staff who come up for pints and water. They get theirs. You check your e-mail for any reports, but there are no e-mails. You can’t buy water with cash, and you quickly learn that there are no tills, only iPads linked to a Wireless Network that doesn’t work, that is supposed to connect them to the online Portal that has gone down after being accessed buy a couple of hundred thousand people all at once.

On the second day they went back to cash on most of the bars. The functional iPad bars stayed open and serving both cash and card. Only they gradually went offline as the iPads were splashed with beer and became caked in Jagermeister. A final part of the whole UX mishap was the refund. You charged your QR card with cash via one of the credit card booths at the festival, and you haven’t been able to use it. Refunds start at 9pm on the last day and end at midnight. Or so we heard. There wasn’t any information we could find online. So we found the last working iPad bar and emptied them the analogue way.

Lessons learned:

1. Communicate your problems. People become more frustrated when they don’t know something.
2. Make the distance between your customers pockets and your coffers as small as possible.
3. If you’re going to make the distance between your customers pockets and your coffers greater, then make the experience of paying for something simple and easy.
4. You have your customer’s e-mail address. Use it.
5. Till systems are expensive for a reason. They’re durable. They’re tried and tested. iPads were not made for this and they won’t stand up to the test.
6. Have alternatives. You’re putting up a barrier between people and fluids. Always have a non-tech contingency.
7. Water. Water. Water. Come on San Miguel. It’s just water and it’s over thirty degrees out here. If we’re talking outdoor festivals, water is as much an essential part of the UX as being able to purchase a ticket.
8. Scale. The main problem was the Portal going down. It’s easy to estimate traffic when you know almost exactly how many people will be logging on all at once. If you’re putting all your trust in a network, make sure it’s sturdy enough to cope with your traffic.

Experiencing these gaps in design and execution can be applicable anywhere – not just a festival. We’re doing projects that use codes, phones, networks. You can’t ALWAYS rely on these things to be reliable, but the fewer stages there are in a chain, the less chance there is of something going wrong. Unless you’re throwing Jagermeister over absolutely everything.