Christie’s Launches iPhone App for Venice Biennale

Started in 1895, the Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition which occurs every two years in Venice, Italy. The event, which opened to the public this month, runs through November 27, 2011. More than 375,000 people visited the last Venice Biennale in 2009.

International auction house, Christie’s, launched a free iPhone App for this year’s Venice Art Biennale, with a lot of excellent features, and in this week’s blog post, I focus on two of them that caught my attention:

Execution of the Mapping Feature
The map not only enables attendees to geo-locate all of the official events, it also enables them to do this for independently organized ones too—a nice added-value.

In addition, the app enables attendees to overlay icons for different categories—Pavilions, Events, Eat & Sleep and My Biennale—on the map. For example, an attendee could choose to show only pavilions on the map, or just places to eat and sleep. My Biennale (option 4) allows attendees to create a custom map with just those areas highlighted they want from options 1, 2 and 3. Very user-centric execution here.

End-to-end Mobile Execution
When I clicked “Visit Christie’s” I was transferred out of the app environment to a landing page that recognized I was using an iPhone and offered me two options:  Download the Christie’s App or visit Christie’s mobile Web site. The execution here reflects Christie’s focus on optimizing the “post-click experience” by keeping it 100 percent in the mobile environment, and offering users a choice of mobile media.

A user’s experience is only as good as the weakest link. If you invest the time and money to create a great app, then follow through with a strong post-click mobile media experience. You risk losing a user’s attention if you redirect them to your regular Web site, which is difficult to navigate on the small screen, or a poorly designed mobile Web site.

As you develop the mobile strategy for your show and work to solicit and/or add value for sponsors, keep this end-to-end strategy in mind. It is win-win-win for your show, sponsors and attendees.

Posted on June 23, 2011