The most popular group of posts in the history of my blog center around problems with and alternatives to Evite, the mostly famous online party planning an invitation service. Recently I stumbled across a new service, MyPunchBowl, which is a Web 2.0 take on this service. I’ve only started to play around with MyPunchBowl, so it’s very hard to say that it’s better or worse than Evite at this point, and as with any web 2.0 application, MyPunchBowl is surely ripe for the typical AJAX user experience issues.

However, after a cursory look at this new application, it does seem to solve two of the major problems that I pointed out in my initial review of Evite. My biggest problem is the way the Evite interface puts undue pressure on the user to come up with something interesting to say in the message field when responding. Although it does offer an alternative where the messaging area is not visible at all to guests, this takes away the ability to see who’s going to the party, which is at least part of the point of it in the first place. MyPunchBowl handles this issue in two ways: first, it separates the messaging from the response. Users who respond “Yes” can then view the message board and post comments if they choose. The beauty of this is that the person is not asked to make comments while they respond to the invitation; as such they are probably more likely to quickly answer without worrying about saying something witty or funny or deciding to come back later when they think of a good comment. Users who respond “No” to the invite never even see the message board; instead, they are prompted to pass along a private message to the party host. I love this because it prevents those incredibly awkward and mostly annoying decline messages such as “Hey Mike, thanks for the invite your party, it sounds really fun, but unfortunately, I have to take my cat to the dentist next Saturday so I’m not going to make it!”

The other huge problem with Evite is that the invite e-mails are terrible. They provide no information about the party, and generally just waste a lot of space. MyPunchBowl, on the other hand, still has a somewhat cheesy graphical display, but at least offers the ability to show the description of the event in the e-mail itself (so the user doesn’t need to click to find out what the event is). I especially find this helpful with people who are at work, who might not want to click. The best possible scenario, and something that Evite alternative DarkGuest offers, is the ability to respond directly from the e-mail, giving people yes / no / maybe choices directly in the e-mail body. Despite not having this feature, however, the e-mail from MyPunchBowl is definitely a step in the right direction over the useless e-mail from Evite.

I should also point out that Evite has recently been giving me a ton of technical issues. Last time I tried to organize something, I had to set up the invitation three or four times because for some reason, every time I tried to set it up, it ended up erasing all the data I had previously entered. Perhaps I did something wrong, but a user like me should be able to figure these things out relatively quickly; to have this happen several times shows some definite usability issues.

So, in summary, combining these issues with the intriguing features of MyPunchBowl, I’ll definitely be trying this new service the next time I organize a gathering of friends.

This post was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.

Yahoo! news has just (I think) added a new feature on some of their news articles that allows for an AJAX search lookup of some terms within the article.

It is a neat idea, although often much of the results overlay “window” appears below the fold of the page, especially if the link is towards the bottom. If they could somehow sense that and move the window accordingly, that would be nice.

It also makes more sense in some situations than others. In the great article I was reading, for example, it made sense for the linked text “Britney Spears” to bring up pages related to her. On the other hand, when I saw the text “The Smoking Gun” linked, I expected to be taken to that site.

Interestingly, when I saw this a few days ago, the icon next to the name was a downward arrow. Since then, they have replaced that with a magnifying glass icon, which conveys the “search” theme a bit better.

[Yahoo! News]: Britney and the Saga of the Bald Billboard

In Jakob Nielsen’s recent Alertbox, he talks about how annoying it can be to have to select something (in this case, state) from a dropdown menu while moving through a form. I agree — it forces the user to stop what they are doing and focus on the finicky dropdown menu. Personally, I like to tab through the fields, and, although it is possible to get through the dropdown without picking up the mouse, I often find myself having to do so to correct an error.

I do, however, think that Jake is being short-sighted with his recommendation to offer a text box that asks users to enter the two-digit state code instead. With all the advances we’ve made in AJAXy auto-fill form technology, why not use something similar to the USAIR airport code field generator that I mentioned back in August? There are only so 50 states, so a simple table of all the possible entries would be somewhat easy to build, and this way the user has instant confirmation that they are typing the correct state.

The auto-fill would be even more effective if it provided the entire state name; the one thing Jake fails to mention is the fact that users probably don’t know every state code (if, say, they are mailing something to a friend or family member elsewhere). It would be rather easy for someone to think MA was the state abbreviation for Maine, for example, if they were from New Mexico and didn’t think of Massachusetts (especially with the pathetic state of geography knowledge in this country).

Gucci takes a bold step at capturing the emotion and feeling of the in-store experience on their website. Instead of providing search and navigation like most eCom sites, Gucci instead uses flash to display handbags on shelves as one might see in the store; the user can scroll horizontally (but not vertically) to browse through the entire selection.

Pros:

Gucci is a high-end luxury brand and this site establishes them as such. By displaying the product in this light, the designers are able to bring some of the emotion that one might get from shopping the store online.

Product details appear within the interface, sliding out and making it very easy for customers to view the details of several products without a pogosticking effect.

Cons:
The horizontal scroll is not typical of websites, and as such may not be clear to some users. (although the arrows and the overall design do afford that there is something more to the left of the viewable area).

This design idea clearly will only work for some companies and products; those with a deeper product line or less high-end product would never be able to pull this off.

Typically if I’m talking about US Airways, I’m complaining. This airline, at least in Philadelphia, normally seems unconcerned with providing any kind of passable customer service. However, today I discovered a feature in their new reservation system that made me positively happy. As you can see over to the right (yellow highlight mine), when the city name is typed into the text field, the form uses some kind of AJAXy, Google Suggest-style functionality to autofill based on what the user has begun to type.

Personally, I use these online travel engines a lot to scope out possible trips, and I get very frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the “airport finder”. (Often times, if the airport code is not specified and only a city name is provided, the page refreshes and forces the user to make another choice before continuing.) This particular feature, however — although somewhat minor in the grand scheme of this page — makes finding the airport code for the city in question much, much easier to do.

Bravo USAir! It’s about time!