Show HN: Klavado.com – instant, free meetup creation without login | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Klavado.com – instant, free meetup creation without login

klavado.com

39 pointsetewiah41 comments

This is great, though I wonder if the social dynamic of the participants deciding when and where to meet actually works. I'm a meetup organizer and I find that it's difficult to get anywhere in event planning with a decentralized decision making process.

I have a few other thoughts as well:

- It was difficult to figure out where to start typing to describe my meetup. Instead of just an ellipses, a more standard input field would be instantly recognizable.

- I noticed that if you load the site for the first time, the blinking cursor is on the meetup description, but if you tab away, it loads a map, at which point there are two input fields. Then clicking in the map input field is futile - it places the cursor back into the meetup description. But it looks like there is only one input field, so it can be quite confusing.

- Using the user's current location would be great.

- I didn't see "How it Works" at first, probably because I tabbed away and the map view expanded. But besides that, there's a lot of vertical space that's not actively helping the user understand the site. If you eliminate a lot of the negative space, you could end up with essentially a text input field (a la Google) and the description: http://imgur.com/uY0F27D

- Speaking of which, I think the description should mention what you as the user have to do, instead of what happens. "You get a unique url to share with participants" should be "Enter your meetup description and a location and you'll get a unique url to share with participants", etc.

Overall, great work! I like the workflow.

Wow, if I could give an award for the best feedback it would go to you ;) You even included a screenshot - awesome!!

I wonder though why you think the social dynamic of the participants deciding might not work. Surely the best time and place will most often be the one that most people go for.

- good point about the input field. I actually spent a lot of effort trying to make it look the way it does but you are right, its probably confusing at first glance.

- yes, I should only show the second input if the first one has something in it. Will fix that.

- Will use location detection eventually but not a priority right now.

- Totally right about the wasted space. Thanks a lot for that!

- Also right about the text.

Wow, don't you want to work with me on this. You're just the kind of person I need to work with ;)

The flow for creating a meet is slick and works really well. I was actually surprised that it found the pub I was suggesting to meet at so quickly and easily. Nice work. A few suggestions:

1. When I can "Invite people to suggest places and times by sharing this url with them" it would be great if there was some kind of pre-populated email that could be send that contained a blurb about the meetup and some info on how they would use the link they have been sent.

2. When I return to the site as someone who has been invited it is not immediately clear if I need to do anything, maybe a big "Yeah, I'll attend" button?

3. Could the meetup page show who has been invited and who is attending?

Thanks for the feedback @rhubarbcustard

re 1: Yes, I will add some default text about how to use the site which can be edited before sending. In fact, I need to do more explanation generally but for now I'm going with the simplest implementation.

re 2: I'm currently working on the basis that when someone 'thumbs-up' a place, it means they will attend. I'll re-think that today. Maybe I should have an attend button for those who don't care about the place but wish to attend anyway.

re 3: It is currently possible to add a comment saying '.., .. and .. have been invited' Will that not do the job?

BTW, have you got anything to do with Rhubarb radio at the custard factory in Brum? I'm based in Brum myself ;)

Perhaps the invited party can comment to say they're going, though it'd have to be mentioned that this action is expected of the user. Even if it's just their name as a comment...but it starts to lose value if no one knows who that person is (only among friends would it make sense). If not just among friends, there might be a field for a link to one's preferred social network profile, for verification (by the organizer).

I also dislike the collaborative feature because, as another HNer mentioned, it isn't too conducive to a smooth meetup process.

If someone selects 'attending', is then asked for their first name and then, optionally, can add a one-time pic of themselves (rendered slightly larger than a thumbnail), that'd help too. The only issue with that is then you'd obviously have to deal with logins, passwords, etc.

Yes I think there is quite a distinction between how groups of friends would use this app and how people who don't know each other beforehand would. I'm aiming more for groups of friends (or at least people who would recognise each other's name and have little motivation to give wrong info). For such people who want a quick tool with no hassle around creating an account, adding pictures etc I think klavado could be good.

#2 and #3: That is probably fine, the thing that really struck me was that it wasn't clear what the user should do when they visit the link they were given.

Only time I visit Brum is to fly somewhere from the airport, so no! Name came from a favourite sweet when I was younger and it was also the name of a great cartoon in the 70s.

Ah, perhaps the radio station at the custard factory is a reference to the cartoon or the sweet.

You are right about the expected user action not being very clear - I'll have a think about ways to fix that.

Thanks again for your interest.

Ah, and just to give a bit of background. I've been working on various ideas to help people find interesting places for a while now. My main project is actually this (which for now is mainly being publicised in Birmingham, UK):

http://chattymaps.com

I then realised that with just a little bit of tweaking, I could use that same codebase to help people organise informal meetups so that is what I'm trying with klavado.

Soon I'll have to decide which of the 2 implementations has more potential. Will be interesting to hear what others think.

I love the concept. I cannot tell you how much I hate sites like evite that need to know my email address and spam me and show lots of huge ads.

That said, I think the name is terrible. What does it mean? Is it significant in some other language (than English)? This may just be my age, but when I read it, it reminds me of Clamato - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamato - a disgusting clam-and-tomato-based juice drink. Probably not an association you want to have with your site, though maybe not a problem for your target demographic.

Ha haa - I'd never heard of Clamato before. It sounds horrible!! Yes I would prefer to have a nice sounding name that had something to do with the concept but I can't for the life of me think of one. If associating it with something you hate makes you remember it, that might not be such a bad thing.

If I turn it into such a great site that you love using it, you might see a can of Clamato one day and want to drink it ;)

It sounds exactly like "nailed" in Spanish, but with K instead of C.

Yes, the original concept was for the Spanish market but I thought I'd try using it with this anyway.

This looks useful -- wish it had a better name ("klavado.com" might not be that easy for English users to remember.)

Minor nits: Would be nice if "end" was obviously optional, and start could start at a more intuitive time than midnight. Also would be a nice touch to show the local timezone (e.g., EST or whatever).

But I think it is an awesome start.

Yes, I have struggled with names. I also own moodleboard.com and I thought of using that but I think klavado.com is better.

Thanks for the pointers about the timepicker - you are right. I will update it later this week.

I tried to find out, how many countries use a 12h clock instead of a 24h clock, but the best I could come up with is Wikipedia:

"The 24-hour clock enjoys broad everyday usage in most non-English speaking countries, at least when time is written or displayed. In some regions, for example where German, French and Romanian are spoken, the 24-hour clock is used today even when speaking casually, while in other countries the 12-hour clock is used more often in spoken form."

and this link: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/34950/which-large...

Wow, good point - I hadn't even thought of that. I'll consider using the 24h clock instead.

I´ve been looking for something like this. I really like it. One use case, but very specifically optimized for that. I love the simplicity. Agree with most of the improvements already mentioned, but given this is v0.1 (props for launching early!)...keep it up!

Thanks for the big up Nelly ;)

So the term "meetup" has become been "kleenex"ed to the extent that it is OK to use it in the marketing of a project meant to compete with meetup.com? I like the project, I just find this interesting.

ha ha - yes I realise its a bit of a buzzword. I initially thought of klavado as a 'place polling app' or a 'doodle.com for places' but I found most people I showed it to just saw it as something for planning meetups so I just went with the flow...

What would you call it, if not a meetup?

Back button hijacking is the devil.

Please don't do that.

mmm, not sure what you mean. Its just regular emberjs pushstate. What did you experience with the back button that you did not like?

I'm not able to return to HN from your website by clicking the back button.

Ah okay. Thanks for pointing that out. Its my mistake. The link I've posted is to http://klavado.com which immediately redirects on the client side to http://klavado.com/welcome/easy-meetup. When you click the back button you return to klavado.com but that immediately sends you back to easy-meetup. My apologies - that is a mistake on my part - I will fix it and push that change out tonight.

Great app, great UX and nice use of what looks to be liquid-fire. One question; the feedback bar you have fixed on the side; did you accomplish that by using any specific ember addons?

Well spotted, I do indeed use liquid-fire - and I will make better use of it in the next iteration. The feedback bar is actually quite independent of the rest of the site: its from uservoice.com ;)

This is excellent! One feature that's a definite that I couldn't figure out quickly: a "find meetups near you" button!

Some thoughts:

* Map marker should be draggable

* Email invite

* Facebook share / invite

* Optional signup

* Friend list for members

* Ability to easily invite friends to meetup

* Fix the medium resolution

Hey @juhq, that's great feedback - I really appreciate it.

Apart from the first point, they are actually all things I'm working on. I wanted to put it out there now just to get an idea of how useful people would find this tool and how much effort I should put into it. Would also be interesting to hear what people think should be my priorities.

For now, the next thing I'll work on is to allow people to get notifications - basically an option to provide an email address to which I can send a maximum of 1 message a day if something happens in the meetup.

As to a draggable map marker, I don't really see the value in that. When you add a place, people can vote on that place. If the marker gets dragged to a different place later, the votes become meaningless.

FWIW, I would not use the site if it required me to enter other people's email addresses. I would also advise my friends not to use it as I wouldn't want them to enter my email address into it. I don't know if not being able to enter email addresses would make it a non-starter for your typical user, or not, though.

I'm curious what "fix the medium resolution" means?

I think that the map screen should probably be responsive and adjust height to fit the screen, is it this or something else entirely?

I made some mistakes with the media queries I'm using at the moment. I will fix it as soon as I get the chance.

Very interesting project. I found the UX pretty solid.

Although, I couldn't zoom the map with my mouse wheel. Is this intended?

Thanks romankolpak - and this is version 0.1, hope to improve on it soon ;)

With the map zoom, I set this on my map: "scrollwheel: false". This was because it was annoying on tablets and mobiles - without that set, when you try scrolling the page on a mobile with the map where you touch the screen, only the map would move.

Perhaps I need to detect when the user is on a mobile or tablet and only then disable it....

This site is awesome! Great work etewiah!

Thanks mokkol, I appreciate the appreciation ;)

Love the tool but, I think it could be extremely useful to add recurring events

Good point, thanks. Will consider adding some concept of a collection of meetups. This will allow users to group a bunch of meetups in one space. Within than collection a particular meetup could be set to be copied to different dates.

Klavado.com is awesome! Congrats!

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