I’ve been away. I was attempting to have a holiday but generally failing due to the curse of the crackberry.
So before Artsfest kicks off this weekend I thought I’d download a few thoughts into a blog post before this place gets filled up with photos.
Before going away, we managed to get a couple of projects finished:
This is a user-generated tips sharing site for people who are following Jamie Oliver’s new show on Channel 4. The idea being that if you are into growing and cooking your own vegetables you can share your ideas and problems with other similar people. It seems to be doing quite well since launch. We did something similar for How Clean is my House a while back, which was equally well-received.
The site is based around the idea that if you give users a space which is not called ‘a forum’, you allow them to create and own their own content in that space. By defining some rules - in this case we are limiting the submissions to text, with short summaries, tagging, commenting and (I’ve pushed hard for this one) _no titles_ on entries you remove the ‘how to react to the blank canvas’ problem.
Then, add a weekly competition element with Digg-style thumbs up (no thumbs down, no star rating) you introduce an element of fun.
So far, so good - it looks like there’s already some activity, which is great. More on this when I get a minute.
For the past couple of years we’ve been working with Audiences Central to look at ways of improving the way that they work with their clients using the web. We set up a revamped site that allows user submission of various pieces of content, has premium downloads and resource packs as well as tons of RSS-available data.
Audiences Central also run a listings service for the West Midlands called ArtsCentral (developed by Uniservity), for which they regularly (as in several times a week) go through all of the correspondence from the arts organisations they work for and add any events they can find into a central database, divided up by event category, location and a bunch of other things.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Marketing Birmingham, who are responsible for c£2m (citation needed) of marketing spend for the city each year approached Audiences Central with an idea. They are running a major campaign aimed at marketing Birmingham’s Arts offering and they wanted the push of the marketing campaign to drive people to a website about what is on offer in the city.
So in a good example of joined up thinking, they set up a meeting between 3form, Audiences Central and Marketing Birmingham to see if there was a way to use the already existing data that Audiences Central were providing, using some 3form thinking on how to make it accessible and usable and branding it to align with Marketing Birmingham’s campaign.
So, using our user-centric project definition process, we asked a few questions, the main one being:
What would people want or expect to see on a site about the arts in Birmingham?
Our thinking was that there is a gap in the market for a simple, easy-to-use calendar of arts events just for Birmingham. There are plenty of sites around - Birmingham Alive, What’s on in Brum, BiNS, Upcoming.org, Last.FM, etc. all providing a variety of events listing services with a variety of target markets.
In this instance, we thought that the ‘user need’ that the site needed to address was to answer questions like: “What’s going on this weekend?”, “My mum is coming to visit next month, I wonder if we could catch a show”, “I’d like to be kept updated via email or RSS of events that are going on so I can book early”.
So we built a site to address those (perceived) needs, making a calendar of arts events the central feature of the site (in fact the main content of the home page) with some additional extras including a competition, the ability to showcase particular events, an aggregated news feed of events from Audiences Central on things that might be of interest to site visitors, a multi-user blog, and the road-map has us adding more and more useful features over time.
Oh, and all of the events are available as RSS (iCal / vCal / microformats are in the pipeline).
So as a user you can combine our feed with a few other feeds from the city and suddenly it’s much easier to find out what’s going on… BiNS have already proved this is working. We’re tweaking the feed to make it work in the best way so any feedback gratefully received.
The purpose of this site is to enable people to access arts events in the city, to remove barriers to engaging with the arts and to help develop audiences for arts organisations.
When we were building the site, we were in the common position of having a set of brand guidelines developed by the project’s ad agency to work from, in this case McCann Erickson’s Birmingham branch.
The campaign is called “Birmingham Feel the Heat” and has its own logo, typeface, colour guidelines and imagery which we incorporated into the design of the site.
It launched last week, and the following day was blogged by a few people.
It turns out that the day I went on holiday it started getting some user comments - some of it positive, some of negative and some of it just downright funny.
I’m not going to get into the whys and wherefores but suffice to say that a row sparked off on various different fronts, and dragged me into it when I was supposed to be relaxing in France, spending some time on my first family holiday with Emily and our nine month old daughter.
My reaction - I just want this site to be a success because a central listings resource of all of the arts events happening in the city is something that we have needed for a long time.
At 3form we have focussed on making something useful that will be of real benefit for people visiting or living in the city. There are things I’d like to improve about the site now that it’s up, and phase 2 of the site development is due to go live at the end of the month.
If there’s something naggingly obvious you think should be included (why aren’t the events listed in microformats, how about a send to a friend function, how about each event having a URL, etc, etc), or something that you think needs to be changed (we’ve just found out that the Birmingham Post are still using IE4 on Mac OS 9 and erm, the CSS just doesn’t quite work for them, for example) then send me an email or leave a comment.
8 Comments
It’s a site I can certainly warm to. At the moment the RSS feed looks a little cluttered with repeat entries and may benefit from being broken down into a series of more niche feeds.
I’ve always felt the lack of just in time info from arts organisations. Could users sign up to a text or email service which alerts them to last minute ticket availability for shows that evening (again broken down by niches). Could that also be combined with a payment/booking facility using their mobile phone accounts (sorry I’m getting giddy now).
@Nick - all good ideas certainly!
The RSS feed _is_ a little cluttered. Unfortunately this is due to the way events are stored in their main database. An event can have a start date and an end date, but it can’t handle complex things like ‘every second sunday of the month until January except in the Christmas period’. We’re working on it… we’re erring on the side of _more_ data rather than less, but making sure all the data is accurate is the trick!
Re: Feel the Heat. A search facility would be useful. I heard that Editors are playing soon but I don’t know where or when.
@Joe - Yes. Search is on the way for this phase, you’ll be glad to hear.
Repeat events (even if on different days) is the killer for me, which makes the RSS not as useful as it could be.
I used a simple function on Yahoo Pipes to filter out all but the first for the BiNS combo feed, but the database structure could make events lasting over a couple of days difficult to implent in a tidy way.
My actual worry with it is the type of events that are covered, as there’s no facility to add your own (apart from an email). Too much data is the right way to go I think, which incudes the data covering all types of stuff (from the NIA to Project X to Sludge Lees at the Barn on Brookvale Rd). This is a huge job to try and get the data yourself and hand add it to the database, too huge - which means user adding (and then moderation) is the only way to go.
There’s a need for a Brum version of upcomming.org basically, and people at the big organisations caring enough to put thier stuff in to. Something I’ve been thinking about for ages without actually getting round to doing anythign about it.
Keep up the good work.
I’m not gonna comment on the Feel the heat branding as it’s already been covered (the rest of the site looks awesome though), but the one thing that kind of stood out to me is the arrow alongside the event titles not being clickable, I kind of expected it to be.
Good work though mate, I know how tough it can be working to another companies brand guidelines.
“…dragged me into it when I was supposed to be relaxing in France…”
When will you learn that holidays are a great time to switch off all electronic devices and never go near a computer?
Just a quick comment to say that the Feel the Heat listings are taken from Arts Central which is searchable (although not as good as it should be I admit). So if you wqant to be able to search arts central is the place to go.
Audiences Central enter listings form Birmingham and the whole West Midlands region into arts central. If we are missing events or venues please feel free to email them to whatson@artscentral.co.uk and we’ll get them up as soon as we can.
We’re committed to getting the listings as widely available as possible. Feel the Heat is one example of that, and we’ll be continuing to look at ways of improving the quality and breadth of the listings, how listings get entered, and how we share them with others.
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