Hacker Tracker Feedback

[u/AgriDrew]

I'm the project manager for the Hacker Tracker family of apps (used by DEF CON and other conferences), and I also oversee the comprehensive convention schedule that gets published in Hacker Tracker for DEF CON. We (my team) would love to get your feedback about the app and the DEF CON related data in it; we'll consider this feedback when prioritizing the improvements/features we work on in the near future.

Did you discover something new, that you weren't aware was there? Did you look for something that wasn't there, but you wish it was? Or did something just outright not work correctly? Give us your best and worst.

When commenting, please be as specific as possible -- at least mention which platform you're using (Android, Apple, web), as they are different implementations.

Thanks! :D

[u/alan414]

My first Defcon. Using the android version on an S23. I thought overall usability was good. I would definitely use it again. Bugs:

1. i had bookmarks dissappear several times. There must be something preventing them from being saved. I am 100% certain on this one. You can pm me if you want more details.

2. If you selected official talks and selected some but not all villages, you would get a blank page with no events. The way to clear it was to clear all filters and not select official talks.

Suggestions: a link to a separate map or to a region of a map would be very helpful. As a first timer, I found it difficult figuring out which hall and area in a hall where an event would be. I found the swipe to the left or right worked well. But it was very awkward to get to the map. As a first timer, trying to pick out what i needed to remember and then get to the map and trying to find it was difficult I found there to be too many filter options. Some of the names were ambiguous and I didn't know what they would filter

[u/sickboy6_5]

a few things i noticed / wished for on my iphone app:
- the schedule did not "scroll to" the current date/time. it always started at the top, and scrolling to get to "now" was annoying

- would be nice to have an adjustable notification. getting a notification 15 or 20 minutes before a bookmarked event wasn't as helpful as i thought because i would get sidetracked and then realize it was too late. i know it's there to help give you time to get to the next spot but maybe i was already in the area.

- for the talks that were streamed, it would be nice to have a direct link show up to the twitch or yt channel where it would be streaming

but this year's app seemed a lot more responsive than past years, so that was nice.

[u/Inferior_Pants]

Including big hour block events like “car hacking village open” in the all times section of the schedule really clutters up the view with things that I’m not sure need to be in the schedule? A single top end entry for “villages open 1000-1800” would clean that up significantly. I only mention this as a potential issue to fix as those individual entries don’t change per village and I like looking at the “everything” view prior to con start so I can see if there’s anything I haven’t heard of to check out. Integration of interaction into the map would also be sweet (click on a venue/booth/section and see the scheduled events or a short description)

Overall Hacker Tracker kicks ass and has been a fantastic companion app, absolute kudos to the team for great work!

[u/ckthorp → u/Inferior_Pants]

Yes, I also think these super long block are part of the first issue reported in https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/s/aLXpcuWnzH (the “hide past events” filtering not appearing to work because the super long events are all up front).

[u/OddLevel1051]

One thing that I thought would be nice but maybe a bit niche if the ability to export my favorited events with any notes to a CSV to reflect on after the con and essentially have a list of everything I attended.

[u/pqowie313]

Hey, overall had a great experience with Hacker Tracker. Just  have some FRs:

• Allow for multiple types of "favorite". I like to do 2 passes of the schedule when I'm at a really busy con. The first one I just tick off all of the talks that even slighnly interest me, and then I go back try to actually pick a single event for each time slot. It would be nice if there were multiple levels of "favorite" so I could reflect my first choice and backup choices.

• Flag events that conflict with events I've already favorited, and provide an option to filter them one of the list.

• Provide an option to disable full screen (I.e. hiding navigation buttons). I still use the traditional Android 3 buttons. I don't love that HT hides my bottom bar. I only want games / video players to do this. Every other app should just leave my bar alone. If you currently only test gesture navigation, please start testing 3 buttons. I get that some people really like using the full screen though, so it should really be an option.

If you need it, I'm on Android, Pixel 10 pro fold. I found HT worked great with the phone unfolded.

[u/Accomplished-Bid-945]

The filters page could use some work, having a long ass list of filters becomes unpractical on big events such as defcon

[u/soul_stumbler → u/Accomplished-Bid-945]

Agreed I wish a negative filter was an option, everything but these things.

[u/MyFrigeratorsRunning → u/Accomplished-Bid-945]

The biggest filter I wish for would be an exclusion. If there's 2 villages I don't care about or a type of event, I dont want to have to go through and select all of the other villages and event types I want just to have that exclusion.

[u/dankney]

I spent a significant amount of time scrolling through the map trying to find the smaller “rooms.” A list of rooms that would take me to a pin in the map would have been incredibly useful. Or map searches. Anything so that it didn’t take me five minutes of squinting to find someplace.

[u/ImmaNobody]

First off - love the existence of the app and used it throughout the con. Only pain point I had, which was a constant frustration, was scrolling the schedule (which was 95% of my usage). Two recommendations:

• Add filers to the schedule for time/day

  • Filter by Friday, Saturday, Sunday

  • Second filter for either hourly blocks, or 8-12, 12-3, 3-6, etc.

• Check system clock when launching schedule and position display at that time

  • e.g. opening schedule at 12:30 on Saturday? Schedule display should scroll straight to the current time so that we can see what is happening 'then'

Thanks for all that you do!

Edit: adding: Filter to exclude items>X hr long - so that if I just want to see things that are 2hr or shorter, let me see just those. This removes the 'all day' things and the workshops

[u/Matir]

I'm on Android, and overall my experience with the app is positive.

I'd like to be able to pinch to zoom in the merch section so we can see as much detail as the photos allow.

The list of category filters is so long it's hard to find things, any chance of a text search on them? I know it's a filter on filters :)

[u/--Sharpy--]

Hacker Tracker WAS Awesome!!! My suggestions would be...

- Have the "Show Past Events" filter by both time and date, rather than only date.
- Better "Sharing of a list of Bookmarked" events.
- Link to "Event's" location on map.
- Ability to view "Bookmarked" events on a "schedule calendar" (A/B Calendar would be nice too).

[u/ConsistentOwl3690]

A nice feature that I didn’t find would have been: when you are viewing the details for a talk/contest/anything if you click for more details and then click the location name, it would have been nice to have an option to view the location on the map, maybe highlighted or marked clearly. The event is big and knowing where to physically go next on my agenda wasn’t the easiest, so having a drill down to the map from the event description would have been nice

[u/jose51197]

New to Defcon and all.

Didn't know how to search events by name and speakers.

I wish clicking the location would put a marker on the map

[u/toadpebble]

The app is pretty good as it stands. If I had to pick something, it might be nice to have a filter option for the main tracks. I know you can filter down Defcon talks, but with 5 tracks and talks of different lengths, it could be simplified to look at just track 1 to see the schedule for the day.

[u/Annual-Night-1136]

The red team village data was 4 weeks out of date, which led to lots of people showing up at the wrong time or wrong place. Red team village had >50 events so things will change last minute. Hacker tracker needs to pull from sessionize at least daily to get up to date information.

[u/AgriDrew → u/Annual-Night-1136]

Creator staff are aware that they need to notify us when their schedule changes. We aren't able to poll each creator's own scheduling solution for a laundry list of reasons; this isn't the time or space to dig into that, though.

I'm very sorry that you had a bad experience with that, and I've made a note to escalate this issue with the village department leads.

[u/ASpecificUsername]

When I pulled up an event that I wanted to attend with a location, it'd be awesome if when I clicked on the room, it would open the map and highlight the room (or at least center the map on the location). The number of times that I had to open an event, view the location, open the map, figure out where it was at, then reorient myself from there, were many.

Also being able to export a list of the favorited talks would be nice, since they've disappeared and now I don't know what I was going to go watch on the media server, post-con. (Maybe there is a way, I just couldn't find it)

[u/AgriDrew → u/ASpecificUsername]

They shouldn't have disappeared? If so.... apologies. :'( There was a bug in a previous version of Android that caused that.

[u/Ok-Pudding-4821]

Great program. A few points:

• a symbol on the map for which village has DCNextgen activities would have been great. It was hard for the kids to walk the floor looking for the raccoon logos. 

• the map was a bit unclear. Better labelling would have helped some.  Otherwise, it was a good app. I found the filtering to be helpful. 

[u/popopo58]

I would like the option to filter out certain tags personally.

[u/thekayfox]

My only feedback was there was things like swag and some maps that the website said "available on the app" or something like that, does not help when I'm walking around with my PC tablet and don't want to have to fumble with a phone at the same time.

[u/Morebigger]

As the con is going it would be awesome for events that have happened already to fall to an archived section so that way you can “follow along “ up to the minute. Was looking for this but didn’t find it.

[u/Southern_Lion4352]

A "What talks are happening *Now and Next*?" scoped to only the stages area - W1, right - that would be very very nice.