MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.

Many things have changed about Google I/O since I last covered it in person in 2019. The schedule of this developer conference at Shoreline Amphitheatre here no longer runs three days, it doesn’t feature a concert on Shoreline’s stage, it doesn’t treat attendees to two nights of parties… and the schedule itself has become freakishly harder for a journalist to check.

The public I/O site only listed times for the two keynotes that took place Tuesday, while the press schedule page (only accessible via a click from a personalized link e-mailed to journalists) also didn’t break out times for sessions beyond those two keynotes.

Here, for example, is all of the detail the press agenda provided for Wednesday’s I/O info-fare: “Developer programming [9:00 am – 6:00 pm].”

It seems that developers did have access to a complete schedule page but also could only view it by clicking a link e-mailed to them. As one griped in a tweet: “Why is it so complicated!?”

The comprehensive agenda that I sought instead hid behind a QR code positioned at about knee height on the bottom-right corner of each of the large “Find Your Way” maps parked around Shoreline’s entrance. The same QR code showed up on signs outside temporary structures in Shoreline’s parking lot listing each building’s panel track, except their placement often left the code behind a handrail.

Scanning any of those codes with my phone, however, did not point my phone’s browser to a normal Web page with text and instead instructed it to download a PNG image file. To make that graphic less useless, I had to use Android’s Google Lens feature to scrape text out of it that I could search and copy into my notes. That’s right: I needed to use a machine-vision tool to get a version of a conference schedule in which the Find command worked.

I have seen some subpar conference user experiences. But this QR code abuse would be a bizarre UX fail for any tech company, let alone the one that aspires to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Instead, Google has revealed that it can’t organize and make universally accessible a simple schedule grid for its own flagship event.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/05/15/google-reaches-a-new-low-in-presenting-a-conferences-schedule/

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