Above is the EpicMix intro video. I’ve covered EpicMix in a previous blog.
There’s been a lot of these iPhone/Android apps popping up that record your speed, distance and days on the ski slopes. I know, because many of them have contacted me asking if I could review their app in a blog.
I was going to do a big group review, having a look at a whole bunch of them at one time and comparing them, but honestly, I don’t think these apps are something I’d use myself.
Why these apps are failing
I don’t see the point of recording stats and neither do any of my friends. Neither do we care about getting badges. It’s not bad for a novelty ‘one time deal’ to see who can go the fastest, but after you’ve done that once, I don’t see the appeal of constantly tracking the amount of kilometres that I snowboard each day or the speed that I snowboard at.
Me and my friends can’t be the only ones who think like this, because Vail resorts added photo sharing features to their ski tracking app, EpicMix, because they found that not enough people cared about getting badges or recording their ski miles.
What these apps should be doing
Focus on location. This is what 9 out of 10 of my friends would actually use. I’d like to see an app that focuses on updating itself to show my friends exactly which run on the ski hill I am riding. Keep it simple and just have it as a pure location based app that focuses on making it easy for friends to meet one another.
Some apps are already doing this, but none of the apps that I’ve played with do it perfectly and make it complete hassle free to update your location. Automatic location updates are the way to go, in my opinion. Hassle free and simple to use.
There’s so much potential for a good ski run location app. You could go ahead and make it so that it auto notifies you when friends of yours are riding in the area and make it even more seamless to use. Not to mention you could bring back badges, but use them effectively this time.
I’ve mentioned this in my previous blog about EpicMix, but you could do something like award a badge for getting together a group of 5 friends on the hill and the badge also entitles your group to one free large nachos. This would be how to smartly include badges that people would actually want to get.
Anyhow, that’s just my opinion on all of these ski run tracking/badge apps.
– Jed