Ask HN: Review our startup - EventGel | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review our startup - EventGel

eventgel.com

36 pointskirubakaran46 comments

First criticism, concerns, then praise in no particular order. Apologies for duplicates feedback. And I may have gotten carried away...

Criticism:

* We'll start with the offcolor comment: the name EventGel sounds like something KY or Trojan Condoms would sell. This may or may not be a plus depending on your audience and market.

* I am not a fan of the timeline widget (third party?). It's difficult to use and not entirely intuitive. Click-and-drag is slow to respond and when I click on a location in the zoomed out timeline at the bottom it doesn't jump to that location in the main timeline. Why considerations made you choose a timeline widget instead of a calendar layout?

* The design seems clunky and boxy. Maybe if you removed the horizontal bars at the top. In firebug I made all of the top 3 bars the same color as the 3rd bar and it already seemed more "together".

* Blue text on black background is hard to read. * It seems like the yellow help box should be at the top of the landing page, not the bottom. The description you currently have doesn't really pop out visually or promotionally.

* Consider a multi-column layout or a sidebar for things like the twitter feed. You have a lot of different information to present and presenting it in a list makes it hard to find the information I'm looking for.

* Your textareas do not resize when I resize the browser.

* I agree with the comments on the map being too small.

* On the front page, I click on an event and it doesn't tell me where it is. And the bubble that pops up says: "This is the schedule bar for your event." The purpose of the date range is obvious. This text is probably unnecessary or could at least be condensed.

* I agree with the comments about dates. No military time or seconds. Also, please add timezone abbreviations.

* Add the time of day to the activities list.

Concerns:

* Why should I be interested in the site, what is it this is providing that I can't get via a number of other tools like facebook or craigslist?

* How is this going to scale by location? I'm in Boston, why should I care about events anywhere else, unless they are virtual? Will you add an event filter?

* Do you have a plan to avoid spam? Already I see an activity for "Have sex"

* Like spam, how are you going to handle signal to noise ratio on the front page?

* You may want to consider having a proper logo.

* Can you add a description field for the events? What is the event about? What do I need to bring? Etc.

* You seem to have duplicated functionality between the discussion and twitter feed. What is the distinct purpose of each?

* Do you have any plans on helping people promote their events?

Praise:

* I like the twitter feed on the events. Seems like a good marketing tool.

* Big points for the easy signup.

* This is cool. I like the openness of the concept. I agree that this has a lot of potential. Any thoughts on monetization? I could see this being very useful for event planners and caterers and the like to get new business.

* You've covered the event details of when, where, who (but not what).

* The activity feature is helpful for planning events with a lot going on.

We really appreciate that you've taken all the time to give us this feedback - if there's any duplication it just tells us that you're not the only one who feels that way :D

We've started the process of fully redesigning the site based on this feedback and the other great feedback from this thread. Hopefully we'll have something up in the next few days to reflect some of the great design feedback we've gotten here.

I think down the road we will probably remove some of the event focus from the front-page; our focus isn't as much event discovery as it is what happens when the event actually starts.

Thank you for taking the time to give us such in-depth feedback, it really gives us a lot to consider.

Wow! Thank you for the great feedback. We'll take care of all this. As you said, we removed the bars and it already looks better ;)

Your profile doesn't list your email. If it is okay with you, please send us an email [support@eventgel.com]. We'd like to get it touch with you to get your comments once we've taken care the points you mentioned.

Paul (icey) and I have been working on a tool that helps people coordinate plans while attending an event. We've put together a sample "Startup School" event for you to play with.

We're still early in the process of starting up, so any and all feedback will be really helpful to us.

The idea for this came out of frustrations trying to keep track of what was going on at a number of events; right now people are forced to coordinate over the phone, twitter, email, texts, etc. We think that having a central location for everything makes coordinating these activities easier.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

If you think email would be better to get it touch with us, it is : support@eventgel.com

Congrats on the launch. I second much of the feedback that's already been given on this page, but I wanted to mention two other specific things I've noticed:

1) Your "What is EventGel?" box at the bottom of the page (which is evidently anchored to #help) has too much text. It looks like you've listed every feature of your app. Can you reduce that to a few bullets that speak to EventGel's primary benefits, and maybe move the longer copy to an "about" page?

2) Under each comment is a "permalink" link. I think permalinks to your comments here are probably unnecessary in general, but right now those are links to the event page itself rather than to a comment.--so that an event page with dozens of comments has dozens of links to itself labeled "permalink".

Also, tk999 mentioned difficulties scaling the timeline widget. Just as another datapoint: In my experience where this starts to fall down is in the user exprience when you have very many events in the timeline. It is difficult to get this to look and work just right with a large number of user or programatically generated events. But you could also spend some time on design within the timeline. (For examples of both, see, for instance, http://open.britannica.com/timelines?id=128. The timeline UI becomes unwieldy when the events are densely packed, eg. http://open.britannica.com/timelines?id=107) But as previously mentioned, I'm not sure the SIMILE timeline is the right widget for you to be using anyway. I think I'd look to other approaches to display the event information.

Thank you.

1) Fixed.

2) Fixed.

Yup, we are taking care of the timeline issues.

One nitpick: when scrolling up and down the page (using either two-finger drag on macbook, or mouse wheel) the scrolling gets "trapped" once the cursor gets over the timeline.

Good point. We'll fix it.

Meanwhile, you need to becareful about the timeline widget. We used it before but it did not scale up to couple thousand points. I think at the end, you need to write your own timeline widget.

Thank you for the heads up - We've been looking at writing a more specific version of the timeline already, and it's useful to know there may be other issues with the timeline when we try to figure out what to work on next.

A few things that I noticed right away:

- While I personally like 24h time for start and end time, I doubt most other people will feel the same way

- The map is tough to read being so short, a little bit of height there would go a long way.

- Links in discussions would be a lot easier to use if they were auto-hyperlinked.

- The "X attending" under the attend this event button is almost unreadably (did I just make up a word?) small.

I think it's got potential, how do you plan on differentiating yourself from something like meetup.com?

Thanks for the input!

We'll definitely have a think about 12h vs 24h time formatting, you're the first person who's actually mentioned that and it is a bit of an oversight on our part, thank you :D

With regards to differentiating ourselves from meetup: we're building a tool that takes over once the event has started. Evite, meetup, etc are great at getting people to an event, but tools for organizing random mobs of people are lacking once an event kicks off.

I guess you could say that we're focusing on more ad-hoc event planning than something structured like a Meetup.

Thank you as well for your feedback regarding readability!

That differentiation totally makes sense, thank you for that. I can see this being really useful for something like SXSW where there are a lot of impromptu meetups/gatherings.

Something else that just stood out at me: The margin for the description under the "Activity Calendar" section doesn't seem to match the margins used under those sections elsewhere.

" I can see this being really useful for something like SXSW where there are a lot of impromptu meetups/gatherings."

You just made me really happy, that's exactly the sort of thing we're targeting!

(Looking in to the margin issue now, thanks!)

I'd recommend placing some focus on what it looks like when printed. The nature of many events is that people will be going somewhere they may not be familiar with. If you look at how things are printed out, you'll see that it spans multiple pages, and isn't very easily readable. The printable version probably only needs a subset of what you show on the on-screen view, but you should lay it out in a manner so it can all fit on one piece of paper.

Great point. Thank you! We'll put together the printer-friendly page.

The interface makes me feel very "uncomfortable" and a little confused. You should consider laying things out a little nice - perhaps side by side?

The logo / menu / page title instantly create some confusion and clutter. The timeline doesn't look too user-friendly either.

I'm just commenting on the interface though, I haven't looked at the functionality too much yet.

Side by side layout sounds interesting; do you mean putting the activities next to the timeline?

So far, this has definitely been "design by developer"; so feedback regarding the interface is most definitely welcomed.

Since you mention that it's been developer designed - Ryan Singer of 37signals gave a really great talk at WindyCityRails on how developers can build better UIs that you might want to check out: http://windycityrails.org/videos#4

Thanks for this, I have it bookmarked now to check out this evening.

It looks like it was designed by programmers.

Yes, it was :-) We definitely need better design and it is our top priority.

So does Google.

Google’s UIs always look slightly odd and unpolished at first glance but their apps are all nice and elegant. When actually using it you quickly notice that everything is thought through and works as expected. It’s not flashy, the overall theme is a little childish, but all the elements are at the right spot.

I don’t want to start that old stupid thing about programmers and how they are unable to create useful UIs (Sorry programmers, you don’t get off the hook so easily.), that’s just stupid. The above linked site was made by someone who is clueless about UI design. You maybe a programmer, but that’s no excuse. And just some polishing won’t do.

(I would just like to add: I think the idea is great an practically screaming for a sleek UI.)

Good points. Thank you. We definitely want the very best UI and we are not thinking that it is of secondary importance or that we can just spray it on. We will get it right.

I would strongly disagree, just because it's slim doesn't mean it doesn't look designed. I've run across a lot of apps trying to be slim and basically just Google that have failed miserably because they were "designed by programmers". Google has many subtleties to it that makes it a great design.

I think google can be a bad example when making design considerations, because they provide the simplest product on the internet: type in some words, get back a page of links. They don't need any design, they just need to pick the right links.

Spoken like a true programmer.

When you sign up, it automatically fills in where it thinks you live. I'd be careful about this since I signed up @ work and it is not where I actually reside. I'd like a bit more information about myself in the profile, but I understand this is just the first iteration. I'd work on the profile page if you want this to be socially focused.

That's an interesting point; we'd kind of gone back and forth over this one a few times (guessing your location).

We are going to be changing to allow you to modify your location pretty soon here.

What sort of information do you think is useful in a profile for something like this?

(Also, thank you for taking the time to provide feedback, it is really helpful to us!)

It's timely, considering that this came up yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881636

You should convince the HN/Chicago crowd to use it.

It would be awesome if they did! Thanks.

You might wanna consider adding an address book import feature or some kind of invite sending feature via which you can invite folks you know.

Great concept. All the best

Thanks. Good idea. We'll add that feature.

your probably aware that clicking on the 'test' activity seems to cause some sort of exception?

MultipleObjectsReturned at /ev/startup-school/test/ get() returned more than one Activity -- it returned 2! Lookup parameters were {'urlname': u'test', 'event__urlname': u'startup-school'} Request Method: GET Request URL: http://eventgel.com/ev/startup-school/test/ Exception Type: MultipleObjectsReturned Exception Value: get() returned more than one Activity -- it returned 2! Lookup parameters were {'urlname': u'test', 'event__urlname': u'startup-school'} Exception Location: /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/db/models/query.py in get, line 307

Ouch, thanks for the heads up, we'll take care of it right now.

Ha, I had a similar idea. Now I don't have to create it myself, I can use yours, thanks guys :)

I should mention that since this is in an early stage that you guys are welcome to enter data or say you're going to attend events that you don't intend to actually go to. I promise you won't hurt anyone's feelings.

honestly, trying to be consumer minded, i opened your link, throat vomited at the design, and closed it.

You may have a valid product, but the design, and I'm going to assume the usability, is killing you. consumers like shinny and clean.

Now i'll take a second look at your site and provide some feedback on the tool itself.

congrats on going live. It's an accomplishment no matter what state it's in.

Sorry about that; design has been the #1 suggestion we've gotten so far and we have made design our top priority now.

I don't like the tagline: "Events made interactive" from your about statement I think you want something like "Collaborative events"

Congratulations, Kirubakaran and Paul!

Thank you! :-)

This is great! I'm so glad to see you guys launch something. The first step is the biggest.

I don't want to repeat what the others have said, but I've been playing around a little bit and off the top of my head:

  - Separate dates and times into their own fields
  - Only one date field for single day events
  - Add Day of Week
  - Use Date Mask MM/DD/YY
  - Don't use military times.  Don't show seconds.
  - Map widget is too small to be useful.
  - Instead of depending solely on text, add some data fields.
     Some possibilities:
       - Who's Attending
       - Reviews of previous instances of this event
       - Parking
       - Public Transportation
       - Dress Code
       - Don't forget to bring...
       - Wifi available?
     (You get the idea)
  - Sort/filter events by date, location, who's attending

More to follow...

I can't thank you enough for the detailed feedback!

I think right now we're going to focus on getting the design up to snuff, and then we'll probably hit a significant number of these shortly thereafter.

Awesome Ed. Please do add more.

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