Last week when +Motorola Mobility planned to have an interview with the lead designer of the Moto 360 using Google+ Events, they couldn’t even get it off the ground due to technical issues with Google+Events. With 6500+ people signed up to watch the event, it was a Total embarrassment on Google’s part and it made Motorola Look bad as well, to the point that when they finally got the video up and running they had to take the first 30 seconds to point fingers at Google because they didn’t want this experience to make their product look bad. This frustrated me due to the fact that I have said many times before that Google+Events was a half baked product that needed to be fixed, and even voice concerns before through feedback and it appears to remain untouched.
When Google+Events was announced, I had high hopes for this aspect of Google+. In the past I had drawn up designs for a platform similar to the way Events was designed, and when Google announced Events at I/O, I thought it would be a hit and take off! But once I began to use it, I realized it was lacking in many areas. I had hoped it was just a Google Beta thing that will improve over the coming months, because functionality on different aspects was broken and it was also difficult for the end user to input what they wanted to happen in a way that Events would understand.
So below i have listed out some of the big issues with events, and my recommendation on how each of them should be fixed.
1. \”Create and Event\” vs \”Plan a Hangout\”.
When you go to setup an event, you are faced with 2 choices. Create an event or plan a Hangout. Regardless of what you are doing, why is there 2 options? Either way it is an event. Why not just go right into the event settings?
This often leaves people confused with what option to choose if they are planning a Hangout. What if you were planning a Hangout OnAir? This is also more than likely where Motorola got tripped up when they created the event because Planning a Hangout is a different path from planning a Hangout OnAir (we will get into this later.)
2. The \”Show more options are hidden.\”
Once you have started planning an event, you are faced initially with limited Options. Why?
![](\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LE3DQ7VM3sU/UzMzTM5njvI/AAAAAAAAofg/oXSMVuAsGdU/s1600/options.tiff\")
That doesn’t make things simple, but more confusing. Go ahead and show all the options so the user can understand what options they have.
3. \”Location\”
Location should be rebranded to something like \”where is the event?\” with 3-4 options, Address, Private Hangout, Broadcasted Hangout, or other. This option is where many users seem to always get tripped up due to the confusing names of Hangouts. So until this is cleaned up, it should be more specific in events what the users are selecting. This was something that happened to Motorola, Once it was time for the event to start, they had selected a \”Hangout\” instead of a \”Hangout OnAir\” which led to the audience getting notifications to Join the Hangout, which left many users thinking they had to join in order to watch the broadcast, but also nothing was being broadcasted because it wasn’t a Hangout OnAir.
4. Hangout OnAir has you make a trailer.
Since Hangouts OnAir has you make a video trailer for your upcoming event, why cant that trailer be added in an optional trailer link of the Event? This should make the trailer viewable until the event time.
5. A Hangout OnAir should start from Events.
Why does Hangout OnAir start from the Hangouts category in a separate area? Generally this is an event anyway. Merge the 2! This makes Google+ more confusing. But by merging the 2 i don’t mean remove it from its current location. for people who have learned it to be there, that just should become another path to events as opposed to it vanishing all together.
Now that we have gotten through the issues with creating an event, lets open the pandora’s box of events.
6. Embedded Hangout OnAir issues.
If you Schedule your Hangout OnAir via the event and launch it from the event at the scheduled time, and there are other technical issues that force you to have to start a new Hangout OnAir, it will not be attached to the event. If you do a Youtube Live show and there are issues and the link changes, Events allow you to update the Youtube Live link on the same event but not a Hangout OnAir.
7. Recurring Events.
What if you wanted to do this as a weekly show? Unfortunately you are not able to
make a recurring event. You will have to create events every single week. The link to the event (which has now became a show) will change every week. The URL changes every week. So if the person wanted to direct people to their weekly show on their site they will have to change the URL on their site every week.
8. Comments on Events.
Currently, we have 2 Comment trackers. One, has amazing feature sets and is pretty fast (up to 1 minute to gather comments from everywhere) The second one seems more integrated but runs extremely slow at getting comments. Neither of these trackers can track events.
Comments from events should be thrown into a comment tracker native to Hangouts and Events. This should kill the 1 minute delay for people commenting on the event. this will ensure engagement is almost real time. The Event should also grab comments from Youtube automatically if it is a Youtube Live event and post those comments on the event page in realtime as well. So on the backend, Youtube Live comments should be posting on the same database as the event comments, especially since all comments are Google+Comments now (this will required collaboration with The +YouTube Team, so i’m sure it will take some time for this part to happen.)
This should also allow the audience to +1 the comments. as far as searching Google+ for hashtags, the hashtags should be able to be added at anytime, attached to the event so that, not only the Host and Participants can see it, but the audience can see it.
Also kill the \”John smith and 17 others are Going\” comments from the comment section. you have a Guest Section that shows everyone going. Just have the numbers change as more people say they are going.
9. The Q&A app.
Why isn’t this integrated in events? To my understanding if you are wanting to take questions from an audience, this is something that you have scheduled, like an EVENT! This should be a checkbox added to the event when you are setting it up, and it should be apart of an event page.
This will kill the issue of the Q&A app, opening up a huge box on the screen overlaying the Google+ stream. It will just be on the event page, maybe a separate column or category. The event page has a lot of unused real estate.
Somehow integrating the Q&A app and comment tracker into one interface for the Host and Participants of the Hangout OnAir will make it easier for everyone involved because on the Hangout side of the comment tracker, if you want to see the Q&A app you have to leave comment tracker and load the Q&A app interface and vice versa.
10. Events and The Google+ Stream.
When there is a video event coming up, in addition to the \”are you going\” question, the post about the event should contain an icon letting the user know that this is a video event when it is live, and when they click it, it should open a new browser tab, taking them to an event page without losing their place on their stream.
When we take Events to the mobile platform it opens us a new area of problems.
11. Live event in a browser?
Why is it when you try to launch and event video it takes you to the chrome browser?!
WE HAVE A GOOGLE+ APP!
Events, when having a video should be ran from an event section right from the Google+ App. It should also have access to comments and the Q&A app when being ran. Maybe rotate landscape is watching video only and the other way puts the video at the top and commenting and question app below for the user to still be able to interact with the show. (Similar to youtube’s setup.) Tablets have more real estate so following the Youtube App layout is probably the better way to handle this.
The majority of everything i have talked about has been centered around video events. However that is only one use case for events. Some people (like myself) have attempted to use events in other areas as well. I have discovered a few things while using events for gatherings.
12. Party Mode Ends even before the event ends.
I couldn’t figure out why this was doing it but we tested it on almost 22 devices. Once the event starts, android devices asks if you want to enter into Party Mode. This allows the pictures being taken to upload and be apart of the event. if you take a bundle of pictures and then stop for 5 – 10 minutes, Party mode disables itself without notification.
\n\n\nYou have to return to the event and reactivate party mode. any pictures you take outside of party mode was not uploaded to the event. If you enable party mode but don’t take a single picture it seems to stay enabled for almost 2 hours or more. if you record more than 45 seconds of video, party mode disables itself. i thought it maybe phone performance related so I tested it on more devices like the Note 3 and other powerhouse devices, but they all conduct themselves the same way. Party mode should be enabled for the length of the event. if you set the event for 1 hour then it should be enabled for 1 hour. If the issue is that you don’t want the user to be uploading pictures and forget their in Party Mode, maybe there should be a different audible notification after each photo upload to remind the user that photos are still going up to the event. The visual notification is already on screen, (The green camera on the notification bar.)
13. Party Mode should also be server side for devices like Google glass.
Party mode should be enabled on the server side as well. With Auto backup when a users account is enabled for party mode, party mode should be searching threw the uploaded pics. Also party mode should be looking for photos and videos taken during that window of time it was enabled to ensure it doesn’t miss anything.
14. Party Mode Continues even after the event has ended.
Party Mode needs to stop when the event time has ended automatically so the user does not continue to take pics and it keeps uploading. any photos taken after the time should be manually added to the event.
15. Google Calendar and Google+Events
Google Calendar does an amazing job dropping an event into your calendar, giving you a notification that an event is getting ready to start, however the Google+ app is running in the background doing the same thing. so often you are hammered with notifications that an event is starting. then if you happened to catch the Google Calendar notification, there is no way to get to the event from the calendar alert. Maybe once event links are fixed it can be passed to the calendar and the calendar can point you exactly where you need to go. (I don’t mind being hammered with notifications but i’m sure some users hate that.)
These are 15 issues that i think need to be fixed for events to be a relevant part of Google+ and other Google Services. I chose to stay away from the Google Apps aspect of events because that is another bag of hurt. I’m very passionate about Google Products and services because i believe in their ability to build some of the best services on the planet, so when i see things like what happened last week and there is no way to effectively communicate with Google to get things fixed it frustrates me.
If anyone else has any suggestions for Events to help improve them, please add them to the comments on this post as well as submit feedback on Google+.
