Recently I organized an event using Evite and became extremely frustrated with the experience. Evite itself seems great at first — extremely easy to set up and deploy, but for some reason most of the people I know just refuse to respond to such things unless badgered endlessly to do so. After discussing this very topic with some friends and colleagues, it seems I’m not alone in this frustration; People who are more tech-savvy and reliant on the internet for all things seem to love Evite’s potential, but those who are not quite as reliant on computers, for various reasons, are difficult to convert to Evite users.

There are, obviously, a lot of great things about a free service like Evite which don’t need to be covered here. What I really want to look at is why some people are unwilling to respond to this method of communication.

#1 The “message” problem
Although it may seem to be the silliest, this is perhaps the biggest problem with Evite: People feel the need to write something clever in their response. I believe that a good number of people mean to respond but instead take time to “think about” a good response for their message. Obviously, once a person leaves the Evite, the chances of them responding (at a later time) drop tremendously. Many users are even more self-conscious about what they say and fret about seeming too eager or too stupid. For quite a few people, especially those not as comfortable with writing or the internet, responding to an Evite can be very daunting. It gets even more difficult when others who have already responded have written clever or memorable comments.

Evite does offer the ability to make the guest list private, which hides everything from individual users. This may be useful in some scenarios, and may actually encourage users to respond based on their own availability instead of waiting to see other responses. Unfortunately, it also takes away many of the great features of Evite, most notably the ability to view who has been invited and who is planning to attend. If a custom option was offered to merely hide the free text responses, but show the RSVP response, this would make for a much more user-friendly service. Users like myself who are more concerned with figuring out who is coming to the event than reading smarmy comments could set up the invitations to focus on just that. Perhaps an even better way to handle this would be to seperate the response from the message, allowing a message board-style comments trail at the bottom of the page, away from the actual RSVP. Users who wanted to trash-talk before the event could do so, while others could merely provide an update of their status.

#2. Bad Emails
The Evite email is not enticing at all. It is a huge envelope, with nothing but the organizer’s name and the name of the event. A lot of people get these at work and don’t really have the patience or time (or are worried about their boss looking over their shoulder) to click into a web page that is decorated with stock footage of a picnic. A better way to design the email would be to have an actual description of the event in the email itself and, more importantly, a way for the user to respond directly from the email itself. Click “Accept this invitation” and you’re done. Another valuable link would be “forward to a different email address” — If the user gets this email at work and would rather view it at home, allow them to do so easily and quickly.

Obviously, Evite needs people to click into their invites because their invitations have advertisements, which supply a revenue stream to the company. So this issue probably isn’t going to improve.

#3. Is it SPAM?
Assuming you know the person organizing the event, Evite is not Spam. However, Spam has changed the way people view emails. Especially at work, when people receive third party emails they often don’t respond well. Although they would never specifically say that an invitation to my party is spam, they might approach it with trepidation as if it was.

Without doing a full-scale usability study of Evite, we can’t possibly know all the problems it faces. It is clear, however, that there are some definite stumbling blocks to email invitations reaching their potential.

Check back soon for my study of Evite Alternatives.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005 at 7:25 pm and is filed under web UI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.