Normally I’m not the kind of person who heads out to writing festivals – I’m usually either working or attending a concert.
But this year, things were different. The Ottawa International Writers Festival kicked off with tons of publicity in the newspapers and TV stations.
So naturally I went to the website to check out the schedule.
Normally reading a schedule for a festival is fairly easy. Not so this time. After 10 minutes of reading the schedule, I gave up.
One would think that a group of writers could communicate a schedule in a clear and direct way.
The festival schedule is written out with long descriptions of each event. That’s great, but some people would like to see only who’s appearing, not a description of each event.
The ‘schedule at a glance’ isn’t much better. The schedule can’t be read with just a glance. While it’s definitely better than the official schedule, it’s still difficult to read and takes several minutes to read through all the events for the festival’s seven-day run.
I’ve attended many different festivals where the schedules, both in print and on the web, were easy to read.
Take Bluesfest for example. On the website the schedule is sorted into stages, then by date. Under each date you see the time and the name of the artist. Then if you’d like more information, there is a link to a profile of each artist.
The same goes for the printed brochure for Bluesfest. The schedule is one part of the program, while the biographies are printed throughout the booklet.
By this point I was pretty frustrated with the Writers Festival’s schedule.
Why? Because in many of Ottawa’s newspapers I’d read that Ian Rankin was appearing at the festival. I knew that he was definitely going to be there, since he was listed as one of the festival’s authors.
I’ve read six of Rankin’s books. He writes mysteries, normally involving the same main character, Detective Inspector Rebus. The stories are set in Scotland and certainly aren’t written in any kind of formulaic style. He’s written a total of 26 books, 18 of which are part of the Inspector Rebus series.
In the end I found the date and time of Rankin’s appearance. And I also discovered that Richard B. Wright was appearing right after Rankin. Wright won the Booker and Giller prizes for his novel Clara Callan. I made the trek to the National Library and Archives earlier this month and managed to catch the end of Rankin’s talk on his new book, Fleshmarket Close.
A large number of people attended Rankin’s speech on the last evening of the festival, despite the problems reading the schedule.
The Ottawa International Writers’ Festival should seriously consider making their schedule more user-friendly. If people are discouraged by simply reading the schedule, chances are that they’ll give up and stay home instead.