This year, I spent my vacation in the cultural center of Northern California, San Francisco. The time spent there was remarkable with its culturally rich streetscapes, neighborhoods, architectures, contemporary life, beaches and parks. When biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, it was difficult for me to see the upper most part of the bridge due to the fog…which is perhaps why the city is nicknamed Fog City. Coincidentally, this marks the bridge’s 75th anniversary. Even though I had just missed the celebration by 2 months, by viewing videos of the commemoration, I can still feel the overpowering festive atmosphere.

Redesigning a website can sometimes be more of a challenge than building one from scratch because you have to present it with a fresh new look. You have to determine which elements should stay and which ones should go.

With websites, users become more accustomed to the workflow and functionality. So with the new design, will this be insightful or just confuse the regular visitor?

Here are a few changes that we improved on the site:

• Our products and services are fundamental for our company; that is why with the new design, they stand out or “pop” more. In the old design, the colours which surround those items would blend too much into the page.

• With the current trend of the internet for sites being more “2.0“, we have made our site of that manner. You will notice we take advantage of white space and removed elements on the page to look less cluttered.

• There is now 3 ways you can contact us if you need assistance or just have questions. These items can be found at the top right hand corner of the page: phone number, chat with our team or email.

• Social networking is important to us. The more we connect with you, the better our software and services can grow…and sometimes we’ll give you something back for all of your support! We have implemented an option for you to join our InviteRight or ElectionBuddy newsletter, see our Twitter feeds, and links to our Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages.

Click here to read Marketing Director Ken’s feelings towards the new EventIQ website! Hope you all enjoy the fresh new look of the site. Let us know what you think!

Artist James Roper constructed a project that took three years to finish. On an average of 10 per day, Roper would craft origami flowers which totaled 10, 000 flowers once the project was finished. He calls the art piece “Devotion” and says, “The title refers to the act of creating it itself as well as religious practices found in Hinduism, the repetitive practice of mantras and the flowers used in devotional ceremonies.”

A YouTube user came up with an interesting project with his 5 year old daughter. He presented her with different logo brands to see her first impression. Some logos she recognized while others she had interesting perspectives. Check out the video below.

Generally, companies decide they require a chat icon on their website to improve customer relations and/or consumer confidence. The chat icon should be visible on the website within seconds. Statistics have revealed that regardless if a consumer uses the live chat or not, it will increase website sales by almost 29%.

Here are a few tips to consider when implementing a chat icon on your company website:

• Place the icon in a consistent location. If a visitor is in need of assistance, they know precisely where to locate the live chat.

• Don’t make the design of the live chat button too overwhelming. People are on your site to obtain information; not firmly to live chat

• You don’t want the button to blend too much with the site. Even though the design scheme may be to design the button with the pattern of the site, it may camouflage too well and become lost.

• Keep in mind a section on the site the user will always find the chat icon. If you position it merely on a single page, the user may forget where they found the button, thus the sale being lost.

• Users should not have to adjust their experience on the site such as substituting to a different browser to find the chat icon. Test the button on your site before implementation.

It may take a bit of time to discover where the best place to situate the icon is but it will be well worth the time and effort. It should not be the main focus of the site but be familiar enough to users to locate if they require instant online communication.

Last week, a student from Hong Kong is now feeling speechless about the volume of publicity he is receiving. Johnathan Mak, a university graphic design student designed the Apple logo to substitute the area with the apple part being bitten into a silhouette of Steve Jobs. Initially, Mak designed this as a memento to Steve Jobs after his resignation in August but it was only when Steve Jobs had passed away that the design went viral.

Mak has already received thousands of emails and messages on Twitter about his creation. Companies from different countries have contacted Mak striving to buy the copyright of his design. There still may be some copyright issues since the design is based on Apple’s logo. He has even been contacted with hundreds of job proposals but Mak has kindly declined them since he would like to finish school first.

Since Steven Jobs died from pancreatic cancer, Mak has decided that any earnings he receives from the logo will go directly towards cancer research.

One of Mak’s main inspirations of his designs comes from Steve Jobs. Jobs was a courageous man who strongly believed in his concepts and designs and continued to advance forward no matter what the repercussions or what people criticized him about.

Did you spot all of the differences? Not all were obvious and there were certainly a few tricky ones! Here’s my break down for all the changes I made to the form and why.

1. Change Sub title from “Registration” to “RSVP”
One of the main rules of thumb for creating an effective InviteRight form is to always consider who will be using your event’s form. In this case, since it is a party, your users will expect to RSVP rather than to Register. The term “register” is typically reserved for conventions or seminars. It is a slight semantic difference to be sure but if your hope to guide your users through the forms without confusion then these are the types of considerations you must keep in mind.

2. Include a Deadline / Name the deadline “RSVP Deadline”
It is easy to forget to add in the “Response Deadline” in the Create stage of your forms, but including it and placing it at the top of your forms gives your guests urgency for making their decision.

3. Change “Personal Information” to “Attendee Details”
My very first blog post addressed this very issue of titling your headers in a way in which your users will not feel as though they are revealing sensitive “Personal Information.” Again, all of the wording of your forms should consider the context – Attendee Details and even RSVP Details is more effective than Personal Information.

4. Capitalize the “N” in First & Last names
It’s a small change but one I always try to remember to do this for aesthetic and consistency sake.

5. Remove the Address information
We default the Address question to appear for all of our forms but there are certainly events – such as party RSVPs (among family and friends) where you would hardly require the need to obtain that information. If you don’t need it, get rid of it! Extraneous questions will only clutter your form.

6. Remove the heading from “Additional Information”
This heading, as a information separator, does not provide any particular usefulness in the context of this form and only serves to take up more vertical real estate. By removing it you can “chunk” together very succinctly all the questions you want your guests to answer in the Attendee Details section. Keep in mind this notion of “chunking” information or questions to make it easy and logical for for your users to work through your forms.

7. Personalize the event details text
You don’t need to settle on our the default text! Personalizing the event details is your chance to speak directly to your audience. You want to have people come to your party? Jazz it up then! Providing a personal touch to the events details gives your guests context and emphasizes the importance of their registration or RSVP.

8. Provide the exact location address for the Google Maps link
By providing the exact location (during the create status) your forms will have a direct location link to Google Maps that appears in both the registration and confirmation pages. This makes it easy for your guests to get Google’s step by step directions to your event whenever they need them.

Now you’re on your way to becoming an expert forms creator!

To be a Forms Design “guru” at EventIQ one must have a keen eye for detail. Subtle adjustments can make a world of difference in making your registration forms concise, look great, and that much easier for your guests to fill out.

See you if you can spot the differences between the two following RSVP forms. I would urge all of you Free Trial Users to consider making similar edits to help tighten up your RSVP forms. The answers will be provided in an upcoming post along with explanations for all of the changes.

Happy hunting!

OLD

NEW

It’s been a while since InviteRight has acquired a new appearance. Over the past few months, we have worked attentively at the design of the application and always considered users on how confortable and enjoyable it is to create new events and view and extract all the data gathered from the system. Some of the changes have been drastic while others are very subtle. The new design will be implemented in the next few weeks so in the meantime; I will provide a sneak peak at some of the new look and feel.

Administration Area
You may notice that our mascot “Dwight” will be emerging more in our system. He is here to aid and direct you through any problems that you may stumble upon. When you first log into the system, you may spot Dwight at the top of the screen. This new administration bar Dwight sits in extends across the screen allowing you to easily see your login information, sign out button, help button and the capability to jump to any of your events instantly.

Buttons
The buttons on the site are now rounder and colourful. In sharp glance, all of the action buttons are more visible and invoke a more gratifying feeling.

Event List
The data in the event list is now simpler to read. The heading of the columns are bold and data is separated within a table. Subtle shades of grey and white are alternated between each row for ease of viewing large amounts of data.

These are just some of the alterations we have implemented. We hope you enjoyed this sneak peak of the design changes we have implemented just for you! Stayed tuned for the system update!

I was motivated recently to pick up a book (actually it was handed to me by The Boss so naturally I started turning pages) titled ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ written by software developer Steve Krug. Even though the book is about a common sense approach to web design, it occurred to me the lessons in this book can also be applied to other processes besides web site design.

Krug suggests web designers sometimes let their design innovation overtake and overwhelm how sites function. and they can be too innovative with their designs while forgetting about how the site functions. He emphasizes that you should change up your web page design only if the new product is:

A) changes are self-explanatory and do not require a learning curve.

B) changes add so much value that it’s worth a small learning curve.

From my time here at EventIQ, I think this philosophy also applies to the registration and ticket sales process. Certainly there’s many different methods for selling tickets and registering people for big events, but I believe InviteRight, our flagship software product, is worth investing a bit of time to learn because it adds immense value to the process of getting people to your event.

Changing Your Ways

But I’ve learned that some people cling to their processes like Linus does to his blanket. We tend to stick to things that work and seldom look for a better way, Krug says, especially when you cannot see the value of making a change. Why bother investing the time in climbing the learning curve when you are unsure of what the outcome will be?

There’s lots of reasons not to change, but I would hope that event organizers would be open to change. That means recognizing when there is value in change and suppressing the impulse to just stay the course. When it comes to events why continue to muddle through a process which is more time consuming and by extension more expensive?  The professional event planners tell us that they have enough to do in their day with ludicrous deadlines, flocks of customers and committee members  with conflicting needs and interests, etc.; a great reason to look for better ways to streamline their day.

Try It (for free)

I get that people are naturally skeptical, but I take to heart the one comment I hear time after time when doing a demonstration:  “Wow.”  And I love sharing Wows. I could write a book about all the steps involved in a manual process for selling tickets to a graduation banquet and how your time can be better used. Instead I would rather you see for yourself how InviteRight can improve your process; go to our website where you can experiment and test out the features with InviteRight for free.  Yes, you will receive a follow up email, but, no you won’t be inundated by phone calls or emails afterward.  But I love talking, so feel free to email me too!