As the largest congress in the mobile industry returns to Barcelona next week, the excitement surrounding Mobile World Congress is well founded. Following the enormous success of MWC 2013, which drew some 72,000 attendees, expectations are high for this year’s event.
Organised by the GSMA, the conference is planned and executed with meticulous attention to detail.
In addition to the online portal “My MWC,” the GSMA provides attendees with a mobile conference app. This on-site interactive tool offers comprehensive event information and includes 13 in-app features designed to save time before, during and after the MWC.
For events on the scale of Mobile World Congress, a reliable app and a solid organiser are essential. To gauge how well the GSMA app performs, Testbirds used a crowdtesting approach to evaluate the experience.
With more than 4,000 different Android device models on the market, developers face growing challenges in delivering a consistent experience across all devices and configurations. These difficulties are amplified when target users are hard to reach during development, raising the question: can developers rely on internal testing alone? Common limitations of internal testing include insufficient device coverage, organisational blind spots and biased results.
In a fiercely competitive app market, even minor defects can determine whether users return to an app. When these small failures occur across thousands of devices, they can significantly influence an app’s success or failure. That’s why both quantitative and qualitative usability testing are vital for building customer loyalty—especially for an app connected to a highly visible event. Crowdtesting can address many problems left unresolved by traditional testing methods.
The crowdtesting concept distributes a testing task to a diverse group of people who may not be domain experts but are trained to assess usability and functionality. Outsourcing testing to a crowd can free internal developers to concentrate on improving the app’s user experience.
User expectations continue to rise as more apps with similar purposes compete for attention. Feedback collected from a broad, unbiased group of users is more authentic and directly applicable when tuning websites and apps for end users. In Europe, several crowdtesting providers, including Testbirds, operate platforms that manage crowd-based testing projects for software.
Test summary and findings
The tester group included participants aged 26 to 56 from 14 countries, reflecting the international diversity of MWC attendees. The crowdtest uncovered 28 issues spanning low to critical severity. The most serious problems were app crashes. High- and medium-severity issues included major malfunctions such as a non-functioning search feature.
Overall usability was rated positively, with an average user score of 4.9 out of 6 for ease of use. Design received a similarly favorable average rating of 4.7 out of 6. However, the exhibitor listings received criticism for visual shortcomings, including missing company logos and an overall lack of visual appeal. Several testers noted the absence of a clear graphical map of the event, which made locating exhibitors difficult.
Testers also struggled to understand the colour-coding in the event schedule. While the colour scheme was clearer in graphical view, many users were unaware of the different viewing options. As one tester commented, “Although the overall app was easy to understand, some areas like the event schedule were confusing.” A simple solution suggested by testers was to add a menu or legend explaining what each colour represents.
In conclusion, this test highlights the growing importance of external testing by everyday users. Allowing testers to use their own devices, operating systems and browsers in familiar environments produces unbiased, realistic feedback that is essential during development. The results underscore that regardless of an organisation’s size or visibility, bugs and usability issues can still emerge. Regular, broad testing is therefore crucial to ensure that websites and apps meet the needs and expectations of their users.