a&g Goes On The Hunt with SCVNGR

If you compare all location-based services to Foursquare, you need to stop right now. The user experience on SCVNGR, an application for virtual scavenger hunts, is entirely different from those on other location-based services. Yesterday, The Ad Club hosted a SCVNGR hunt for local advertising and marketing professionals to find the judges for the The Hatch Awards. Eight a&g employees joined the hunt in downtown Boston.

How a SCVNGR trek works
- A company or organization licenses the SCVNGR platform to create a journey complete with trivia questions, miniature missions and puzzles.
- Users download the SCVNGR application onto their smart phones and use it to find the locations within their desired trek. They can also play over SMS.
- SCVNGR tracks each user’s progress throughout the trek and awards points for completing tasks.
- At the end of each hunt, the winners are rewarded with prizes ranging from Super Bowl rings to iPads.
What SCVNGR gets right
- It’s easy to access for both users and companies.
- It provides a gaming layer on top of geo-locality that brings the user past the simple check-in found on Foursquare and Gowalla.
- It gives users tangible and intangible incentives to explore hot spots and sights they might not have found otherwise.
- Through the activity tab, SCVNGR chronicles a shared experience for all users participating in the hunt.
SCVNGR still has to overcome a few barriers
- It does not operate well in verticals. Challenges for one trek are mixed in with general challenges as well as challenges from other treks. SCVNGR doesn’t provide a filter for users to find exactly what challenges need to be completed for a specific trek.
- Challenges with open-ended answers are sometimes very picky. One of yesterday’s tasks required users to name what artifacts were displayed in a glass case at The Green Dragon Tavern. A gaggle of Ad Club members huddled around the case guessing answers like “musket” and “rifle.” SCVNGR was simply looking for the word “gun.” On an old-fashioned paper list scavenger hunt, a wider range of correct answers would have been accepted.
- At times, SCVNGR’s challenges are too virtual. They don’t necessarily require users to go find a location. One of The Ad Club’s challenges told users to go to Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park and write a rhyming poem about Boston. But users didn’t actually have to physically go to the park. They could write the poem from anywhere, which takes the “hunt” out of scavenger hunt.
- Scavenger hunts are team experiences, but the application does not make it easy for multiple users on the same team to follow along on each of their phones. Instead, teams share one cell phone that tracks their progress, which can present lots of confusing “wait, let me see your phone” moments. Couple that with the difficulty of trying to read a cell phone screen in bright daylight.
SCVNGR has enormous potential to allow users to find the gaming layer on top of the world around them. New developments for the application are popping up all the time, so expect some of these issues to be resolved soon. SCVNGR just announced a rewards program earlier this week, and a Blackberry application is rumored to be on the way.
The location space is expanding in many different directions right now. Want to talk more about location-based services and some of the goodies we’re working on at a&g? Drop us a tweet (@schneidermike or@EricLeist), leave us a comment, or contact us here.













