While interviewing a community member about one of our demands regarding signage at Sakura-Con, they also told us they were not able to find information about Artist Alley even after 5 clicks on the website. So one of our advocates investigated the experience of looking up information for Sakura-Con which resulted in this observation:

Between Sakura-Con’s website and the Eventeny app/website, there is not a reliable single source of truth that contains ALL of the basic information up front which we define as:

1. Show hours and locations of the halls in a highly discoverable section
2. Readable maps
3. Basic accessibility information

Note that we have not seen the printed booklet for this year yet and will review that at the con.

Below is a summary of the limitations of each resource which we discuss more deeply after that:

Sakura-Con website

• Show hours and locations are not listed on the webpage for Exhibitors or Artist Alley. It may be searchable in the embedded Eventeny Schedule (see limitations in the section for Eventeny website).
• No maps at all
• No basic accessibility information

Eventeny app

• Show hours and locations are not surfaced up front. User must know the precise name of the ‘Exhibits Hall’ and search for its text, full or partial, in the schedule. Aside from already knowing its name, it is possible to accidentally stumble on the correct name if and only if the user is attempting to type a search term containing ‘exhibit’ (e.g. ‘exhibitors’, ‘exititor’, ‘exhibit’) one letter at a time (no gesture-typing). There is no fuzzy search.
• Maps are distorted, missing room labels, and cannot be zoomed.
• No basic accessibility information

Eventeny website

• Show hours and locations are not surfaced up front. User must know the precise name of the ‘Exhibits Hall’ and search for its text, full or partial, in the schedule. Search requires a carriage return (Enter) and is not queried in near real-time so the odds of accidentally hitting the right search term are much lower. There is no fuzzy search.
• Maps have a max zoom of 200%. Pinch-to-zoom is possible, but only if the user knows to click into ‘See full map’. There is a bug in which the drop-down selector for maps will be obscured by floating labels so it’s hard to impossible to switch from one map to another.
• No basic accessibility information

So between the three resources, information is fragmented. The schedule may be available on the Sakura-Con website, but there are no maps for figuring out where to go. And maps may be available on the app, but they are not actually useable or readable there. And the Eventeny website may have maps that can be zoomed, but the zoom is capped at 200% with pinch-to-zoom undiscoverable and several bugs that literally and figuratively get in the way. There is no reliable single source of truth.

In all three resources, basic accessibility information is missing as we already know. But there also is not a basic summary of the hours of operation for the Exhibitors Hall and Artist Alley–the money makers. Every other convention has the hours prominently on its website so that attendees can plan when they want to fit in their shopping before it closes.

The Exhibitors Hall raises a major usability bug on its own. Since the schedule is the ONLY place where the show hours can be found and it is listed NOWHERE ELSE, a user has only ONE path to the information: search the schedule for the Exhibitors Hall to see its hours. However, this presents a catch-22 because the user must know the precise name of the hall.

We have purposely used different names interchangeably throughout this petition update to make a point that people have a variety of names for the room. Despite Sakura-Con calling it the ‘Exhibit Hall’ this year, in an open-ended poll of 37 people asking “What do you call the giant room with all the sponsor booths and booths that sell merch at Sakura-Con that is NOT Artist Alley?”, all but 1 respondent called it Exhibitors Hall (its previous name for years), Vendors Hall, Dealers Hall, or Expo Hall. The 1 who listed ‘Exhibit Hall’ did so jointly with ‘Exhibitors Hall’. Asked what other word they would search if their first choices didn’t work out, no respondent said ‘exhibit’. Additionally, typing ‘exhibitors’ or ‘exhibitor’ in the search will not return any results since those words are not in the description of any entry and Eventeny does not support fuzzy search. ‘Exhibit Hall’ is not an intuitive name change.

The name especially manifests into a bigger problem because the entry in the schedule for the Exhibit Hall may possibly have a typo. On its Friday and Saturday entries, it is listed as ‘Exhibits Hall’ while Sunday is listed as ‘Exhibit Halls’. The inconsistency adds to the confusion.

The last resort a user may take in trying to find the hours of the Exhibit Hall is to scroll in the schedule until they find it. Since Artist Alley and Exhibit Hall are not conveniently surfaced at the top, it will take 18 seconds to scroll and scan until they appear in the list. That’s not a good user experience.

The alternative to this mess is simple: place the names, hours, and locations of the Artist Alley and Exhibit Hall in every surface that a user would search. The cost of inaction will result in attendees arriving at a hall after it is already closed. In a poll of 52 people asking “Without looking, what time would you assume Artist Alley closes on Saturday at Sakura-Con 2025?” with multiple-choice options for 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm, 35% of respondents selected an option that would have been after Artist Alley closed at 6pm. Anyone who would have wanted to test their assumption would have needed to jump through the unnecessary hurdles of searching for the hours in the schedule because they are not surfaced at the top level. All of these poor experiences are completely avoidable.

We have emailed bug reports on the issues below and will append an update if we hear back:

1. The inconsistency of ‘Exhibits Hall’ across the Sakura-Con website and Eventeny app/website
2. The missing show hours
3. Accessibility bugs in the maps

Our team of advocates are problem-solvers. We are the type of people who would communicate when a typo needs to be corrected because we just want to help. We would have filed these bugs much sooner, but the app, maps, and schedule only came out on Friday, April 4th. We reported the accessibility bugs that same night. It has now been over a week since then and if the bugs persist until the event, Sakura-Con will have had 13 days through Day 0 to resolve them, which will have been more than enough time. We have only heard back from the info email address which failed to acknowledge our accessibility bugs in the maps. The Board has yet to reply to any email that we have sent.

Setting aside our demands for an accessibility webpage and accessible signage for a moment, what would it mean if Sakura-Con does not list its show hours as we have instructed and justified? Our team of advocates and the signers of this petition may consider an accessibility webpage as ‘basic’ requirement, but EVERYONE needs the show hours and locations. If Sakura-Con chooses not to paste the show hours everywhere by Day 0 to avert a massive usability bug like we described–if they cannot surface BASIC information that would benefit their sponsors, vendors, artists, and members–is this Board of Directors even capable of doing anything on behalf of their members? Why would anybody want to send yet another email to a Board that does not respond–not even to ask for more time or to give a status update that it’s already being worked on? Why does Sakura-Con Board ask people to ‘send an email’ when they themselves cannot be bothered to send emails back?

Take away all of their potential excuses and you are left with the unfiltered truth: the highest levels of leadership at Sakura-Con does not want to listen to its members. This petition exists to force them to listen. Please continue sharing our demands until the Board takes action. And if the Board is reading this--please feel empowered to challenge this notion by taking action.