It’s not going to win any awards for design or usability, but hey– here’s a draft of the event submission form.
I realize the “(really) Short Description” might seem kind of gimmicky– but hear me out.
In a previous iteration of the site, I used to feature hand-selected pull-quotes for certain events, which I liked in principle but was tedious and discriminatory in practice. I want to have short summaries of events to use on index pages, search results, Twitter, the newsletter, etc, but hate hate hate machine-generated excerpts. This seems like a fair compromise.
How best to enter dates and times is something I’ve been spending too much time on, but my mind rebels at the typical start date/ end date, start time / end time configuration of other event submission forms. Here are some examples at the ambiguity that bothers me:
This one might be obvious, but imagine:
Start: 1/26 8 am, End 1/29 5 pm
It’s pretty easy for a person reading it to guess that this probably means 8am – 5pm every day of the event, but it could also just as easily be interpreted as being every hour between 8am on the 26th and 5pm on the 29th.
It gets weirder if you add an irregular schedule, like: Start: 1/23 7 pm, End 1/25 6 pm (imagine a weekend event that starts with a Friday-night happy hour). What kind of algorithm or set of rules would you use to reasonably display that on a calendar?
My solution is to just make users define start and ending hours for every day of the event. No ambiguity there.
Comments 3
I like the explicit “Add a Day” for exact hours of each day.
A couple of specific, minor, suggestions:
- Add a character count to short description. Leave to 120 chars (so tweetable with tinyurl. e.g.: RubyDC meeting with presentation about Shoulda testing http://dcte.ch/34s2)
- Add a “Check Location” below the address to test and verify geocoding of the supplied address. That way submitted can verify it looks right or correct the address.
- Ability to “tag”. Especially with autosuggest based on users/existing tags in the system. E.g. “python geo” or “twitter blogging politics”
- Under “Topic” maybe but an Other and then just suggest tagging the event. These can then emerge to suggest new topics.
As a last suggestion – ability to point to a page that has microformatted hCal to pull in event info.
Posted 21 Jan 2009 at 9:29 am ¶- Contact info for submitter? Or does someone already have to have an account?
Look closer– the character count is there. Do you think 110 is adequate?
Tagging is on the radar.
Posted 21 Jan 2009 at 11:24 am ¶The character count for the summary looks fine.
Here are a few things that you might want to add:
- a section about to the form about the hosting organization and co-hosts. people want to know who is behind events. Include a name to contact, number, email address, twitter, etc. in this.
- an event logo upload option, logos are a big part of many events.
- an event registration cutoff date/deadline
- You might even go so far as to differentiate between the promoter and the event principals (i.e. have a dropdown that asks: “are you: event principal, event promoter, just sharing the event with us”). That way you can follow up down the road with marketing that targets the right people.
These things all assume that people are going to be using your website as a primary source of choosing which events they should go to. If
Posted 21 Jan 2009 at 5:16 pm ¶Post a Comment