How to share your 2011 conference plans using Lanyrd | Hacker News Reader

How to share your 2011 conference plans using Lanyrd

lanyrd.com

98 pointssimonw22 comments

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Does anyone else find the Lanyrd UI sloppy?

* Eigerdals Bold font: "i" character is messed up (it's way too tall)

* "Sign in with twitter" overlaps the text below it

* The other "Sign in with twitter" button is cut off

* Conferences today section is just poorly designed

* Trending topics: what does "trending" mean? Is this twitter?

* Topics page: tags that wrap onto 2 lines aren't vertically spaced

* Profile page: columns are too narrow + text too big for list of conferences

In general I think the site lacks some polish and focus. The coverage and books sections just seem tacked on without much thought.

I really like the idea I just think the site needs a good UX overhaul.

Why don't you create a mockup of your ideas and send it to whoever you want at Lanyrd?

If you want to be taken seriously you also should stop phrasing things like: "sloppy", "is this twitter", "just poorly designed." These comments lack content and create emotional reactions.

Out of 7 points, 5 were specific issues.

I understand your point and it would be valid had I just written "it's sloppy and poorly designed". Except I supported those points with a lot of specifics.

UX is about emotional reactions anyway. Regardless, I spent time going through their site and documenting some UI issues I found.

We know we still have a lot to do. Generally, we're trying to find the right balance between building new features that are strategically important to the product and cleaning up the stuff we've already built.

We're a very young site - we only went live in September, and we've actually been travelling on honeymoon (Morocco, Egypt, South Africa) while building the site at the same time. We're now focused on it full time, so expect a lot of improvements.

Out of interest, are you on an iPad? We've only recently seen the site on the iPad, and there's a bunch of stuff we need to fix there.

No, I was viewing the site on Chrome 8 and Firefox 3.6 (both Windows).

I'm glad you guys are always working on improving it. Lanyrd was one of those sites that made me go "how come this didn't exist before".

"UX overhaul" - I'd suggest what you are talking about is actually "visual design" and not "UX".

Lacks focus? Disagree. Lacks the touch of a seasoned designer, agreed.

sigh "UX" overused and generally misunderstood.

You're right on both counts. Although I do think it could use a bit of UX improvement but the bulk of my complaints were "visual design".

:-) It's a personal peeve!

It certainly could do with some usability improvements, but nothing really sticks out as "bad" interaction at the moment. So I think they are correct in focusing their efforts elsewhere!

Edit: that said, Si & Nat, a quick fix, maybe 2 hrs tops, of the glitches would be nice!

Questions for the Lanyrd team (Simon & Natalie):

  1. Do organisers contact the "tracking" members when it's getting nearer to the date of the event?
  2. What's the breakdown between attending vs. tracking? Do these change over time?
  3. What other data are you planning for and making public?

Something that could be interesting is following the tweets for an event alongside the provided slideshows and videos.

Thanks. Keep up the great work!

Tracking doesn't actually do much at the moment, but we have a bunch of features planned that will use tracking to help keep people updated about new information about events.

We haven't looked at tracking v.s. attending trends yet, that could be really interesting - thanks for the query :)

The idea of Lanyrd is great, but there are some annoyances with the way the information is presented. I'm browsing it right now because we're letting all our employees choose a conference or two to attend this year.

1. Once signed in, the homepage displays "Your Calendar" and then events that are going on today. Why? It's not like I can get up from my desk right now and go to Palo Alto or London. The home page would be much more useful if I saw events grouped by my interests, region and social circle, not ascending dates starting with today.

2. Events show COUNTRY / CITY and each links to the /places/ lookup. Really need to put the state in there for US people.

3. I feel like the topics/tags are messy and are just going to get worse. There's UX, User Experience, User Experience Design, Usability, User Interaction, etc. Maybe these have subtle technical differences but it makes it a pain to use. Maybe I'm in the minority but I think un-moderated tags for a site like this are bad. General categories would be a good thing IMO.

Anyway, not my intention to be overly-critical ... just some suggestions on making the site more useful (to me)

Thanks for the feedback. We have a new, improved version of the dashboard coming soon that will hopefully address your points in 1) - the current version was designed when we had very few events on the site, but now that we have thousands of conferences it's important to be able to filter them.

2) is a really interesting suggestion - we've been treating every country the same, but since the US is our largest market it makes sense to make States a special case.

3) is something we've been thinking about quite a bit - again, our topics worked fine when we were smaller, but the strain is beginning to show. Metadata is hard!

We'll be iterating constantly over the next few months, so keep an eye on our blog/twitter account for updates.

Simonw, have you considered using other methods than Twitter for signing in? I don't feel comfortable tying services together both as a user and as developer. I'm curious as why have you chosen for to only allow signing in with Twitter?

See my answer here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981364

Short version: we don't just use Twitter for auth - we also use it as a way of linking conferences to speakers who have not yet created their profile on our site. Doing that with other providers is fiddly.

I like this. I've logged in and added a handful of conferences I'm interested in attending. Now I'd like to be able to subscribe to my conferences through Google Calendar so that it automagically syncs with my calendar on all my devices. As it is right now, I have to grab the .ics link for each conference and add them to my calendar individually. Otherwise, this is neat. Thanks for posting.

There's a link to an ICS feed of just your conferences at the bottom of the right hand column on the homepage once you sign in - we need to make it easier to find.

Thanks! That did the trick. I was looking for it on this page: http://lanyrd.com/people/DavidCuddeback/ ("profile" link), because the main content for that page is the conferences I'm tracking. I figured the ICS feed would be linked to from the same page as the content, FWIW. Thanks again.

How about a "tweet this" link on the profile page to make it easier to share?

I just logged in to add the Founder Conference and see whether this site would help. Oops, it was already listed! Good job in seeding your database :-)

Anybody knows when and where is the next Startup School?

Where? Bay area (Palo Alto or Mountain View).

When? No idea, could be June through October. Last time it was announced only a month ahead of time. I hope it's late this year, so you have two great conferences on starting startups, Startup School in October and the Founder Conference in May (mine :-)

Interesting approach to sharing data Simon :-) Really like the fact that you're pumping out the micro formats.

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