Guestlist

Checkin app

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 11:19:00 -0500

Today sees the first official release of our Checkin App. Designed for laptops and tablets, it will allow you you to quickly verify tickets and check in attendees at the door.

You can access the Checkin App at https://guestlistapp.com/checkin. We also added a link on the event dashboard and attendees tab.

This is only the first iteration of the app. We plan to add additional features as we go along, but we wanted to get it out as fast as possible. Send us your feedback so we can make it even better!

Flexible event descriptions

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 11:00:16 -0400

One of the new features that snuck through and never received a proper announcement was the new formatting options for event descriptions. We have added the ability to:

Adjust text color and size. A few pre-formatted headings have been provided.
Align images. This means you can float images to the left or right and the text will wrap around the image nicely.
Format tables. This means you can finally add a background color to your table headers.

If the built in formatting options is not good enough, you can also go in and edit the CSS directly. This will allow you to finely tweak your event page to perfection.

Sales notifications email

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:39:00 -0400

Starting today you should see a new email pop up in your inbox. The sales notifications email, sent once an hour, summarizes who registered for your events over that time. If nobody registered then you will not receive an email.

If you do not want to receive this email you may disable it in your account settings or hit the unsubscribe link in the email.

Classy email

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0500

Today we have released new versions of every email Guestlist sends. Email is a big part of how we communicate with attendees and there were a few things we wanted to improve.

Branding

We received quite a bit of feedback on the look and feel of our emails. In particular, about the branding. Although we are sending the emails, they are still first and foremost about your event so our design should reflect that.

So we took a step back with the new design. We removed all mention of Guestlist from the email save a tiny byline at the very bottom. The new design has neutral tone while still complimenting the upcoming checkout system.

Emails now have a very simple, imageless design that shows well even when images are disabled. The design also works great on mobile phones, and more clearly communicates pertinent information.

Context

Previously if somebody purchased a ticket on your behalf it would be delivered with no explanation as to its origin. Ticket emails now clearly display the purchaser to prevent any confusion and give credit where credit is due.

Better access to tickets

In addition to per attendee ticket delivery, we have also started sending purchasers a copy of each ticket in their order. This can be very helpful in situations where the purchaser used the wrong email address for one of the tickets or made a typo.

Fewer emails

Finally, if you are just purchasing a ticket for yourself, we will only send a single email containing both the ticket and receipt.

Shiny new event pages

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:33:17 -0500

We have just released brand new event pages. This is a pretty big overhaul from our previous design which has been in use for more than a year.

A better event page

The new event page was designed to scale with the needs of our users. Regardless of how much or how little data you enter, it will look great. Tabs dynamically hide or show depending on whether they have content. Elements realign themselves for optimal aesthetics.

Because we are no longer held back by older browsers, we can take full advantage of the newest technologies and decrease the page load time significantly while improving the overall aesthetic. A lot of time went into polishing the experience and making sure it both looks great and feels great to use.

Mobile support

If you visit an event on a device with a small screen you will see our brand new mobile event page. Resembling a native app, it provides easy navigation and scales across any screen size and resolution. It even supports retina graphics!

An improved editing experience

Along with the new event page comes a brand new edit page in the management interface. The new edit page shows all of our features up front so that they are easy to discover and navigate to. We also include a much improved preview which more clearly shows the changes you are making.

A better way to contact event hosts

On the old event pages emailing event hosts was not as obvious as it could have been. In response we have prioritized host messaging significantly and provided a clean and fun user experience as well.

Discontinued support for older browsers

As mentioned in our previous post, this event page requires a modern browser. In particular we have dropped support for IE6 and IE7. We support IE8 and up and of course Firefox, Chrome, and Safari work nicely.

Big changes to public event pages coming soon

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:34:09 -0400

We’re very excited to announce a project we have been hard at work on. Public event pages are getting a major overhaul. We think the new design is classy, modern, and more effective to boot.

Improved ticket workflow

We have also completely revamped the ticket purchase process. Now, events hosted on guestlistapp.com and events hosted externally will both use a common modal dialog. We have also streamlined how we collect information and have made the whole experience snappier and more polished.

Discontinuing support for IE6 and IE7

We have held out as long as we could, but some of the new things we are working would require significant changes in order support older versions of Internet Explorer. Over the past year usage of IE6 and 7 has fallen sharply and we can’t justify the effort that supporting these old versions would require.

The good news is this probably won’t affect your event. Currently less than 1% of visitors to public event pages use IE6 or 7. We will automatically detect when users are browsing with old IE versions and provide clear upgrade messaging so they aren’t completely lost.

New: A smorgasbord of additions

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:00:05 -0400

Over the last little while we have been working on refining Guestlist and adding features to smoothen the overall experience. There are quite a number of smaller changes and adjustments, some of which you may have already noticed.

PDF ticket tweaks

PDF tickets now display event logos instead of attendee photos. A number of event hosts pointed out that while personalized tickets were neat, it is important to have a strong brand for your event.

Max tickets per event

Often event hosts set caps on different ticket types but still need to ensure they don’t end up with too many attendees overall. Guestlist now allows you to set a limit on the total number of tickets that can be sold for your event.

Option to make sure new attendees receive info emails

When you send an all attendees email, you now have the option to have it automatically delivered to future registrants on signup. This can be very useful for sending special instructions or any custom message that you want attendees to see as soon as they register.

Coming Soon status for tickets

Sometimes you want to announce an event and start marketing it before tickets go on sale. Now you can setup Coming Soon tickets so that visitors can view your event page but not register until you open up ticket sales.

Social sharing links now optional

You can now hide the social sharing links via the Event Settings > Advanced Settings pane. This is useful if you are running a private event and don’t want to encourage attendees to share the event page url on Facebook or Twitter.

Limit the amount of tickets per order

Another setting you will find in the Advanced Settings pane is the ability to restrict the number of tickets per order. This will not prevent people from making multiple orders, but if you are expecting a registration rush this can be a useful way to give more people a shot at registering.

Speed optimizations

Guestlist has been growing strongly over the last few months so we decided to tighten some bolts to make sure it stays as fast as possible. You should notice a pretty hefty increase in speed while using the application.

New support system and custom ticket limits

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:32:51 -0400

We have just released an integration with Intercom to see if we can push our customer support experience to the next level. When you click help in the app from now on you will be presented with a dialog showing you all the communication you’ve ever had with us, and the ability to contact us with questions and feedback.

Intercom also gives us the ability to communicate more easily with our users. With Intercom we can broadcast notices to keep you up to date with what we are working on, let you know about new features, give tips on how to better leverage Guestlist, and more.

We have also released an Advanced Settings tab to give you more control over your events. There are some settings for events that don’t often need to be changed but are sometimes important.

The first setting we are making available in this section is order limit. This will restrict how many tickets of each ticket type can be purchased within an order. We occasionally receive requests for this but never saw it as something a most users should need to make decisions about. While we don’t want to burden users with unnecessary choices we also don’t want to limit needed functionality so we will be tucking away such options in this tab.

If you want to give us feedback on what we should be working on now would be the perfect time to give our new help section a try. Finally, support@guestlistapp.com will of course continue to work as before.

New: Google Analytics integration

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:58:48 -0400

Have you ever wondered how people find out about your events? Are you better off promoting them on Twitter or via email? Starting today you can find out thanks to our new Google Analytics integration. Now you can drop your Web Property ID into Guestlist and gain access to all of the valuable visitor data you need.

Adding it is easy. Click “+ Add new profile” in your Google Analytics account and create a profile for the domain http://guestlistapp.com

Next, take the new Web Property ID (the code that looks like UA-12345678-9) and drop it into the Google Analytics pane in your Guestlist event settings.

That’s it! In a few hours the first visitor data will start showing up in your Google Analytics account.

New: Coupon codes

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:00:06 -0400

We’ve just released our first take on coupon codes. This was one of our most commonly requested features so we are excited to see how people will make use of it.

As usual we’ve built a simple but flexible implementation that should accomodate a wide variety of use cases. We currently support percentage and fixed value discounts.

We have also thrown in a handy Generate Random Code button that will add a new coupon based on the last coupon created, and assign it a random code. This lets you quickly and easily generate a whole batch of coupons.

Up next we will be spending some time polishing interface elements and investing in performance improvements.

Brand spanking new ticket types dialog

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 09:46:27 -0400

Now that the Rails 3 upgrade is behind us we can get back to iterating upon our user experience and feature set. There is still much that can be done to improve it and the most obvious case of this was probably the ticket types dialog.

Ticket descriptions

We noticed that a lot of people where cramming quite a bit information into the ticket name so we added a ticket description field.

The ticket description is the perfect place to put any qualifiers or clarifications that you may have regarding the ticket. Things like bonuses you get from buying this ticket or special requirements you may need.

The infamous Qty column

Other than PayPal, our biggest topic for support questions has been the ticket type dialog. There was a lot confusion as to what the Qty column was referring to. We had intended for it to indicate the number of tickets available for sale, but many people interpreted this as the number of tickets available per order. So some event hosts put a 1 or a 2 here and then became confused when their event sold out after only one sale.

Well, no more! We’ve renamed it “# to Sell” which is much clearer and also added a “# Sold” column as well.

Ticket statuses

Stopping sales on a particular ticket type used to be more difficult than it should have. One had to reduce the Qty field to below the amount already sold which, by the way, was also not so easy to find out. We’ve cleaned this up nicely by adding a status which can take one of three values:

Selling This is the default and behaves as you would expect. Tickets will be available for sale until the # to Sell equals # Sold.

Sold Out When a ticket type is marked as “Sold Out” we cut off sales and display it identically to actually sold out types on the public event page, regardless of how many tickets are remaining. This is good for hiding early bird tickets after the deadline has passed.

Hidden Hidden cuts off sales and completely hides the ticket type from the public event page. This is useful if you need to keep some of the ticket types for special use such as sponsorships or if you have made a price change that you do not want to be publicly visible.

Custom fields

Users had frequently asked us whether it was possible to create custom fields to collect additional attendee data even though we have supported this feature for quite some time. We now have a prominent link right on the ticket types dialog to make it easier for users to discover this feature.

And so much more…

We also fixed a myriad of small issues such as disabled dropdowns not looking disabled (they do now!) and the Guestlist fee dropdown being hard to understand (so hard in fact that we were frequently confused ourselves).

These are all minor changes but we feel it is important to address small points of confusion if you want to build a really solid user experience.

Guestlist on Rails

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 09:00:00 -0400

You might have noticed that it has been a little quiet around here of late. We haven’t gone anywhere and we certainly haven’t stopped improving Guestlist. On the contrary, we’ve actually rewritten it.

A little while ago Guestlist quietly cut over to a shiny new Rails 3 application. We did this without downtime and without anyone even noticing.

Wait, Guestlist wasn’t already Rails?

Many people probably thought Guestlist was already a Rails application. This is *almost* true. We built the original Guestlist using Merb, a Ruby framework that emphasizes modularity and performance. Because the Ruby web framework community is so fantastic we were able to make use of many Rails components even though we were using a different framework.

Why?

While the two frameworks were originally competing for mindshare, over time Merb became an important influence on Rails. In fact, the projects ended up merging and a number of core Merb committers did a huge amount of the work involved in making Rails 3 a reality. We were incredibly pleased with how well Rails 3 turned out and decided that we should invest the effort in upgrading our app in order to take advantage of all it has to offer.

How we did it

We were able to make the upgrade seamless by leveraging many of the great libraries that the Ruby web community has produced. We had Guestlist running on Rack and Unicorn even before they were part of a stable Merb release. We had been very early adopters of Bundler from back when it was still a Thor script that came packaged with Merb. Over time we replaced many Merb components with Rails-compatible Rack middleware. In early February we started swapping out major parts of the infrastructure, getting our large automated test suite to pass, and repeating.

When it came time for the final release we made our Merb and Rails deployment environments identical. This included the database schema, Nginx and Unicorn configurations along with all of the daemons, watchdogs and other monitoring infrastructure. We already use Unicorn for seamless, no-downtime upgrades so rolling out the Rails rewrite release was no different than a bugfix deploy.

Some stats:

242 commits, 903 files changed, 18771 insertions, 32006 deletions.
26 gems added, 23 gems removed, 33 gems upgraded, 27 gems unchanged.

It has been a lot of work but we’re very pleased with the results. We are already starting to make use of many Rails 3 goodies and will be announcing some of the great features we are building on them shortly.

Guestlist downtime tomorrow morning

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 08:55:28 -0400

Just a quick heads-up that Guestlist will be unavailable for approximately 15 minutes tomorrow morning (April 17, 2011) starting at 06:00 EDT.

We will be upgrading our database server so that we can provide you with faster service.

A new face for our website

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:57:59 -0500

First we did a redesign of our logo, then we evolved the application design to make it even easier to use, and now finally we release a new website that ties it all together beautifully.

We are still fleshing out some of the content, so if you have a great photo of a Guestlist event or want to be a featured customer, shoot us an email.

Custom event backgrounds are here

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:57:35 -0500

Just a quick note that we’ve added support for custom event backgrounds in Guestlist.

We’ve wanted to support custom backgrounds in Guestlist for a while. Twitter, for example, uses them to great effect. Although changing the background is one of the only available customizations in Twitter it really allows users to make pages unique and personal.

We try to choose new features that add a lot of value for a minimal amount of interface change. For custom backgrounds we’ve gently integrated uploads into the existing background swatch picker that is found in the event settings dialog. The uploader blends in with the background thumbnails and new images upload asynchronously with progress feedback.

Users who run frequent events will notice that any background uploaded is available for use in any of their events without having to re-upload. We will be bringing these improvements to the logo upload facility shortly.

Finally–although it probably goes without saying for our developer readers–there are a huge number of details to worry about for providing a smooth file upload experience. We’ve learned a lot from building this feature so a more detailed technical post is forthcoming.

Timelapse: Designing a new website

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

We are in the process of creating a brand new website for Guestlist and figured it may be helpful to share some of our design process. Since our launch more than a year ago much has changed in how we see Guestlist and our place in the event registration market. The new website will communicate what we are about more clearly and also allow for some new feature additions.

The Guestlist design process, and really my design process since I am the only one doing design, is pretty simple. I don’t see design as a science. My design is largely driven by gut instinct. What this means in practical terms is that in order to get to a great design you need to go through a whole lot of mediocre and bad designs.

I am not suggesting making ten different versions and picking the best—that would be a colossal waste of time. Rather, a single design is reworked and refined until you find something that makes you think Yes!. A lot of work may be thrown away or abandoned along the way to perfection. Or, you might stumble upon something awesome on your first try.

The new homepage took two weeks to get to a final design, but only 4.5 hours of actual work. Why the discrepancy? If you stare at the same design for extended periods of time things will start to blend together. Sleeping on a design for a day or two will allow for a fresh look.

As the design for the new website comes along we will share some of the design thinking behind what we are doing.

PDF tickets are a go!

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Earlier today we started sending PDF tickets to attendees.

Until now we had sent out “tickets” in the form of html emails. This caused some confusion because it wasn’t clear whether users were expected to print the email and bring it with them. Also, our emails don’t print very well. We make extensive use of color and images which don’t really jazz with most printers.

Today we address those issues.

We will continue to send the same ticket email as before, but now we also attach a PDF ticket that the user can print. It comes with a QR code to help prevent ticket fraud and add that extra touch of professionalism. And because events are fundamentally about people we also show a photo of the attendee if one is available.

A new face for Guestlist

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

After a year of adding new features to Guestlist we decided it was time to go back and tighten up the user experience. We didn’t always have time to integrate new features as nicely as we wanted to, so this was an opportunity to do that and also fix some of the issues that have popped up over time.

Today we are launching the result of that work. While we focused mainly on improving what was already there, we managed to sneak in a couple of new features.

Greatly improved event summary

The event summary page has been redesigned to provide relevant content depending on what your needs are. As you progress through the event we will highlight the next steps needed for hosting a kickass event.

Order stages

Until now we had only displayed completed orders (and their associated attendees) in Guestlist because we wanted to keep things as simple as possible. However, this was misleading in some cases. For example, if an order was paid by echeck, the event admin would have no indication of it until the payment cleared. We now display four distinct order stages to help event admins better understand their order pipeline:

Incomplete In-progress orders where users are currently in the process of filling out information in Guestlist and/or PayPal.

Pending Orders where a payment has been submitted but has not yet cleared.

Completed Orders with completed payments that have not been refunded.

Refunded Orders that have been refunded. If you initiate a refund inside PayPal we will automatically move the order here and make the corresponding tickets available for resale.

Charts!

We’ve wanted to update our recent activity feed for quite some time. A long list of purchase details does not clearly convey how well an event is doing. So we removed the activity feed and replaced it with a chart.

There are lots of other changes as well, but don’t want to spoil everything. Take a look and let us know what you think.

A new face for conversations

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This is a guest post by Verne Ho from Jet Cooper

From time to time, Jet Cooper works with a group that has already done such a phenomenal job building a user experience that our only job is to carry it forward into another form. Arguably bigger shoes to fill, but a challenge we welcomed when our first conversations with Jaco, Ben and Justin from the Guestlist crew started.

In early March, initial brainstorming and conceptualization started around an identity refresh for Guestlist. We understood from the get-go that we wanted something simple and subtle that resonated with the friendly and people-oriented personality they had already established. Naturally, the new mark also had to encompass the smart, casual and social aura that had come to be synonymous with Guestlist-driven events. Easy as pie (or not).

Our approach revolved around finding ways to intelligently integrate a set of imagery and symbolisms that had emerged from early discussions into the wordmark. Location pins, doorways, folding chairs, podiums, name tags and speech bubbles were ideas that stood out. We vetted a handful of concepts by the Guestlist team through several rounds of sketches and inevitably agreed to further explore speech bubbles, folding chairs and podiums as digital comps.

It didn’t take long before we all agreed to drop the chairs and podiums and focus on an interesting arrangement of speech bubbles that we had stumbled upon in earlier rounds. The concept was intriguing - two opposing speech bubbles coming together to form a ‘g’. We had early hesitations around using imagery as cliche as speech bubbles, but we eventually fell in love with the subtlety of the execution. We also realized that not everybody would necessarily see the speech bubbles initially, which further deepened our affection for the concept.

Early versions of the 'double bubble’ were much more subtle than the finished product. The pointers were much smaller, which made the 'g’ a lot more prevalent. We liked this, but were concerned over its scalability as the bubbles became indistinguishable at smaller sizes. We eventually found a healthy balance between the size of the pointer and the play between the 'conversation’ and the 'g’. Woot!

For the typeface, despite trying a few alternatives, we ended up sticking with the Haptic Bold family, though opted to go sans-italics as it meshed better with the 'g’ we had designed. Haptic is great for its ability to convey a warm and playful personality and simply felt right as the typeface behind the original Guestlist identity.

For us, Guestlist represents a genre of events that bring together a collective of smart, young and incredibly inspiring professionals. Those events are often best remembered by the conversations that took place with those people, which is exactly why we think the new mark’s focus on conversation is a step in the right direction.

Though a lot of work went into the process, the end result is a subtle refresh that retains a lot of the brand’s familiarity. We’re very pleased with the final product and feel privileged to have our work grace the face of such a bright and inspiring product. It was an absolute pleasure working with Jaco, Ben and Justin through the process and we’re both anxious and stoked to see how it will be received by the community. We hope you like it!

Trust your data, not your gut

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

As of last night Guestlist has officially completed our first month of business. To mark this occasion I thought I’d share a funny story with you.

In addition to cleaning up workflows and building great new features, we’ve also been adding more analytics to give us better insight into how people are actually using Guestlist. As I was working on this last night I stumbled on a mistake we’d made in rolling out the payment system.

When we started charging on July 12, we grandfathered all published events that our beta users had previously created but not completed. However, we also have this great copy feature to help customers who run repeat events. I think you can see where this is going. Copied events were inheriting the grandfather status and hence were not being charged commission!

As it turns out, a lot more customers were using the event copy feature than I had thought. In fact, this little oversight cost us about 20% of our first month’s revenue! Well, better learning this now than twelve months from now.

I only noticed this because I was investing time in understanding how people were actually using our app. Before this I had incorrectly assumed that not many people were copying events and as a result did not have that in mind when implementing our payment system.

So do yourself a favor and get to know your application usage data a little better. Not only will it help you build a better product, you might just learn something that surprises you.