SpeedQuizzing: A New App For Pub Quizzing.
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By Simon Fitzpatrick 18.12.13
If you’re one of the millions of people who enjoy a good pub quiz but feel frustrated by how easy it is to cheat these days, SpeedQuizzing promises to revolutionise the pastime. It’s essentially a smartphone app that turns your device into a buzzer, which you use to answer the questions.
Free App
The key to its success is that the quiz is so fast that it makes it impossible to cheat by Googling the answers. By creating a speed quizzing free app, the company has allowed anyone with a smartphone to take part in an activity that’s now more like a TV game show than a humble pub quiz.
SpeedQuizzing has spread rapidly this year, and the management team have recently given the app an updated look with a rebranding exercise, assisted by Petr Barak of Malbar Design. The objective of the rebranding was to find a balance between the essential techy-ness of the product and the fun, pub-based aspects.
Pub or Bar?
A further issue was the distinction between pubs and bars – bar owners, says director John Leach, see their places as “progressive drinking venues”, more modern and upmarket than pubs. The idea of a “pub quiz” is not something most of them would entertain.
Losing the word “pub” also opens up the market to church halls and other quiz venues, and the team have now settled on “SpeedQuizzing” as the name of the game itself. The umbrella name for the playing of the game in a pub or bar is “Smartphone Pub Quiz”, while different hosts can use posters with wordings that suit them, like “Smartphone Trivia Night” and “Smartphone Quiz”.
Posters
While the idea of SpeedQuizzing is simple – use your smartphone to buzz in – it can be a tricky one to get across in poster form. The team wanted to update the logo without ditching the existing design completely, and they tested the new ideas on existing contacts. The results made interesting reading.
Most people liked the new SpeedQuizzing design, and a new logo was born.
Opinions regarding the new Smartphone Pub Quiz logo were mixed, however, and Leach was inspired to create a new piece of software for hosts – the Poster Designer. It enables venue managers to create a unique, individually tailored poster within minutes. The posters can then be printed at anything up to A1 size.
Into 2014
The redesign exercise is now complete, and it seems likely that SpeedQuizzing will continue to expand in 2014. It’s taken a great British tradition, addressed the problem it faced – the ubiquity of Wi-Fi and portable internet devices – and used it to solve itself. SpeedQuizzing has already put the fun back into the pub quiz, and the rebranding will no doubt increase the number and variety of potential hosts.
(Images courtesy of SpeedQuizzing.com)
