Monday 10 May 2010

New Features | Preferred Days and Last Updated

There's been a couple of changes to Meetifyr recently, the biggest of which is the ability for an attendee to specify a day as 'preferred'.  This allows them to say "although I'm free for this event on several days, these are the days that suit me best'.
So for a particular day an attendee can be either one of three states; Busy, Free, Free + Preferred.  The idea is that adding this extra option will better enable people to find a day which suits everyone best.

To accompany this option we now total the number of Busy and Preferred people in the column headers.  This was already a feature that had been suggested through user feedback but with the introduction of the Preferred option it was even more important to clearly show how well a particular day suits everyone.



The other change we've made is to start showing the last time an update was made to a particular attendee and also the last time a calendar was updated (we also took this opportunity to improve the look of the attendee list).  Again this was a suggestion from user feedback with the aim of making it clearer to see what had changed since the calendar was last viewed.



We'd like to take this idea further and give a more personalised view of what has changed since someone viewed a calendar but first to make this possible we need to start identifying users, either through logging-on or cookies.  If you have any thoughts on this feature or any others please let us know.

4 comments:

Waldir said...

Nice idea, but I think the implementation could have been a little more minimalist. Look out for visual clutter! A few suggestions:

* Do not take up too much space with colored squares. Simply add two lines below the date, in smaller font, showing the number of preferred and busy (perhaps even better would have percentages)

* Instead of yellow squares in every day that someone marks as preferred, simply shade the most preferred day. Having several yellow boxes makes the visual parsing of the calendar harder and makes us read the text, when it could be so much easier :)

* For the most preferred day, you could either paint the whole header in yellow, or add a yellow border, or some other subtler, but still easily visible visual clue.

Do these ideas make sense?

Simon said...

Hi Waldir many thanks for the feedback.

I know what you mean about the visual clutter, after all, the main design goal for the site is simplicity. I tend to agree that having a square for each busy and preferred counts is a bit too much. I think I'll start to look at a more subtle way of indicating the level of a day's preferred-ness (border colour, background colour\shade) and try to minimise the busy count further.

The first approach I took to show the busy and preferred counts, I did as single neutrally coloured lines. The reason I went on to use coloured backgrounds was to clearly differentiate between them without having to read the associated text but I suppose if the two counts are shown in different ways this would not be a problem.

Thanks again.

johnson said...

This enables individuals to say, "Although I'm available for this event on several days, these are the days that work best for me."
An attendee can be in one of three states on any given day: Busy, Free, or Free + Preferred. The idea is that by including this extra option, folks will be able to choose a day that works best for everyone.You've made some excellent points here. Thank you for providing such valuable information. I learned something from your blog. Keep spreading the word.
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albertjamesen said...

Amazing, Your blogs are really good and informative. I got a lots of useful information in your blogs. Again this was a suggestion from user feedback with the aim of making it clearer to see what had changed since the calendar was last viewed Attorney near me. It is very great and useful to all. Keeps sharing more useful blogs...

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