Jun

25

Alpha updates and improvements - what we’re hearing and what we’re doing about it

Filed Under alpha, product design 

Great feedback thus far - really candid honest feedback. Sometimes I forget how brutal people can be when you ask them for their feedback. No worries though, we’ve got a thick skin here at Event Seek and love the idea of getting good suggestions from our consumers.

I’ve culled the forums and emails and thus far, and it sounds like feedback (excluding obvious bugs) is centering around a few issues:

  • Event invitations and tracking: Everyone would be interested in inviting other users, and then tracking their attendance status. Almost like a mashup between evite and an event calendar.
    • We’ve been toying with this idea for a bit now and really think it is an interesting concept. How do you know who is going to an event that you aren’t planning? Facebook and Evite have it down for when it is my event, but no one else seems to bridge that gap. This piece of the project is in the works and is largely designed. It is a bit tricky to implement however, so it might be a little while before you see this up and live. I know some of you have heard me say this would be coming sooner, but given that we’ve had two customers interested in the past three days, we’re gonna focus on the features that they need for the time being.
  • Adding an event and how much data we need to capture: A couple of you seemed to have difficulty adding a new event, specifically with venues and the number of required fields. Overall the suggestions centered around making less information required, especially venues.
    • Believe it or not, we actually require very little information to create an event and venue. Basically with a title, time, and address you can complete the entire process. Obviously this isn’t laid as smoothly as it could be - maybe we should take some basic information up front and put secondary information in a second set of input fields. I do however recognize this is going to be a tougher question as we are striking a balance between making the process simple and wanting users to put in more information than other event calendars. Look for us to solicit additional feedback as we approach this issue.
  • Event & Venue pictures and other user content: Users can not simply upload photos about an event or post anything other than comments.
    • Our next version of the product will increase the amount of user generated content possible. We’ll look to include event reviews, venue reviews, the ability to share photos, and other options as well. Certainly not in the two week plan (as it is a bit complicated), but it is on our radar.
  • Enhancing the “obviousness” of the thumbs up and down abilities: Many users have commented on the difficulty they had in finding the thumbs and down for an event or venue. 
    • Believe it or not, but those thumbs have gone through more revisions than I want to count! For a long time they were too obvious and obnoxious and we took effort to reduce the amount that they jumped off the page. Well, guess what happens when you develop in a cave for a few months? We stepped too far back in the other direction! We’ll look to clean those little guys up ASAP so that you can find them much easier in the future.
  • Improved search options: Seems like many of you would like to have more searching/sorting functionality. I’ve heard requests for the ability to filter by different metrics, search for different timelines, and search for some categories and not others to name a few.
    • We’ve actually been heads down on search for the past few days implementing some additional functionality that will likely not be obvious at first blush. These improvements are setting the stage for our ability to create advanced search and filtering of the results much like the things everyone seems to be requesting.

Wow, just barely three days into alpha and we’ve already got a huge list of to-dos! All of them are fantastic and things we want to do. As I read back over the requests I’m impressed both by the things we saw coming and the things we didn’t!

Now comes one of the tougher parts of our job, actually trying to prioritize those issues that are most critical and that we need to add/mend right now, and which ones can wait a few weeks/months as we hammer out some of the other needs. One thing that will certainly affect our priority set are customers. We have been in conversations for some time now to bring on beta customers who will work with us both to implement and improve the product. In the near term future, we’ll be focused on solidifying aspects of the back-end support and those features which are most critical to our customers and their decision making.

I’m not saying we’ll be ignoring your suggestions - quite the contrary - many of your suggestions will be critical to our customers. But if you don’t see a sudden change in something you asked about, don’t be surprised. I promise it’s not because we are slacking off…

Oh and an FYI - look for more of our team to be posting to the blog in the coming weeks. I’d like the production team to be keeping everyone abreast of what major issues they are working on. That way as improvements and changes get made, you all can hear it right from the source. I don’t know if their style will be quite as witty and charming as mine, but then again who’s is?

Posted by: Connor Fee

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