Humans in the Design of Festival Timetables

Okay, so I am going to Laneway in Brisbane. For those who don’t live in Australia, Laneway is a music festival that tours major Australian cities including Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.

The lineup is always pretty great for me.  But, at times, the way they’ve organised things has been a bit of a letdown. A lot of people complain about it — my ears pricked up when a friend complained about the design of the Laneway timetable:

He took some time to figure out his favourite bands were clashing:  

Others complained of the same problem, and soon the discussion extended. One commenter ended up making her own timetable last year: 

Festival organisers originally had two methods for giving timetables. First was a straight list which, as Tom Slater found out, took time to understand and see which bands clashed.  The second was to create an account and select the bands you want to see and get a personalised timetable.

Both methods are terrible. You don’t just use band names to plan your day.  You want to know three things:

1. What bands are playing
2. Which times they are playing and for how long

3. Which stages are they playing at.

And it would be good to have all this information for all bands, not just the ones you selected, at the same time including at the festival.  Why all this information? It helps you plan your day and change plans if you have any issues.

But I don’t believe in whining without having a better solution.  So we decided to make a better timetable; one that is visually easy to understand the bands, times and stages.

Just as we were about ready to release our timetable, Laneway released a pdf version.  On first glance we thought it looked okay, and were somewhat annoyed ours would be redundant… but closer inspection revealed that the timetable still has issues. 

Mainly, this is caused by rows seeming to represent clashing time chunks.  Visually, the bands in the same row feel like they are on at the same time even when some sets actually only have five minutes of overlap.

For example, in the below image some bands are on different rows but actually on at very overlapping times.

You also get the reverse – bands in the same row that don’t clash.  For example, the Cults seem to clash with the Panics, but the only overlap by 5 minutes.  You could probably see most of both, if that’s what you liked.

So we made a better timetable. Our improved features include:

  1. The size of the box that the band is in accurately reflects when they are playing, and for how long.
  2. The design allows visual scanning to see clashes.
  3. It’s easier to highlight your favourite bands.

Here you go!

Brisbane

Sydney

Melbourne

And by popular demand, Auckland

    A couple of pro-tips:

    1. Make sure you SAVE the timetables to your computer and print them from there. Our test prints did some weird things when printing directly from browsers.
    2. If you are going to use it on your iPhone or other mobile phone use the ‘back to back’ version.

    We would like to point out that the maps for Laneway are excellent. We’ve included them with the time tables. (Also, for me they should always be connected anyway).

    We have two versions for each city.  The first has the timetable and map on individual pages.  This is good for double sided printing.  The second has the map and timetable, smaller, but on the one page.

    Please share it around.  It would be really cool to turn up to the festival and see our timetable in the hands of strangers.  

    Here is me printing and highlighting the bands I want to see:

    See you there!

    I’ll be dancing to this:

    - Tristan