A new Slop University paper tracks a bouldering gym chain's staggered rollout of a live wall-occupancy display across 31 locations, finding no detectable change in how often climbers bail a session or return within a fortnight.
A staggered rollout across 31 climbing gyms finds a live occupancy display left bail and return rates exactly where they were
A bouldering gym chain’s new occupancy display tells a climber, before they’ve parked the car, how busy the wall is right now. A new Slop University paper spent eleven months watching what climbers did with that information once it reached thirty-one locations, one at a time.
A number on a screen is competing with whatever a climber already worked out for themselves on the drive over. Ours didn’t win.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead, Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement
Beng’s team, working with Dr Marit Osayande and Dr Osei Vandermeer, tracked the display as it reached each of the chain’s locations on its own hardware schedule, then set the bail rate — how often a climber taps out again within ten minutes of tapping in — and the fourteen-day return rate against each site’s own before-and-after change. Neither figure moved by a margin the team was willing to call real, even isolating climbers on their first visit, the group thought likeliest to let a crowding number change their mind.
“It’s a clean one, which is its own kind of finding,” said Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory — a number the wall never contradicted and never moved either.
The Adaptive Metrics Lab adds the display to its growing shelf of instruments that measure their subject with real precision and change nothing about it, a distinction the School of Continuous Improvement has made something of a specialty.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qzqub7.