I was invited by Systers and MWC to write my experience at the MWC conference but I wanted to start with the registration process and what I learnt from it about user experience.
My romance with MWC started on the wrong foot.
When I signed myself, I had to fill up a registration form with different types of information. One of them was my face image - for image verification at the conference itself. This year MWC decided to use a face recognition technology which was suppose to help them with a faster security checkup. Well…
when I entered my face image it refused to accept it, claiming it can’t recognize a face. I tried different face photos of myself, from different angles and lights but unfortunately it didn’t help
And the interesting part only starts here
As you can tell from my profile photo, I look a bit different (hi five to all the people there who look different!) so I thought maybe it could be the problem (although I never had this problem with any other app before). So I decided to try and troll the system. I uploaded images of monkey faces and guess what?
It didn’t recognize them either!
There wasn’t any contact information (mail address or phone number) and the only option for solving it was like in the good old days- going physically, praying for the great lord and casting a spell on the system.
(btw, in retrospect I understood that the image wasn’t an essential part in the form but it wasn’t written anywhere…)
So remember folks, if you are going to work with a face recognition technology which is embedded in your product, make sure it works… and if something isn’t crucial, please specify it (or put it in a different section)
