EventPlus

Online Collaborative Event Planning EventPlus: Facebook Application Eyal Y. Dekel, Noah Levin, Kshama Nagaraja

ABSTRACT

Optimizing Facebook’s event application to promote social collaboration by exploring the following themes: Encouraging Contribution, Goal Setting, Motivation and Benefits, and Social Loafing

Dekel, Levin and Nagaraja (Fall 2008): Online Collaborative Event Planning

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Table of Contents

Introduction........................................................................................................3

Scenario..............................................................................................................5

Background......................................................................................................10

Site Design .......................................................................................................12 Wireframes .............................................................................................................. 12 User Testing ............................................................................................................ 13 Click-through........................................................................................................... 13 Facebook Wireframing Template .......................................................................... 14

Site Details .......................................................................................................15 Invitations ............................................................................................................... 15

Friends who are going........................................................................................... 15 Language Breakdown ........................................................................................... 16

Planning .................................................................................................................. 17 Item List................................................................................................................. 17 Carpooling ............................................................................................................. 18 Polling.................................................................................................................... 19

Post-Event .............................................................................................................. 20 Stories ................................................................................................................... 20 Feedback............................................................................................................... 21 Media Sharing ....................................................................................................... 22

Discussion........................................................................................................23

Conclusion and Future Work..........................................................................25

References .......................................................................................................26

Appendix ..........................................................................................................27


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Introduction Planning social events is difficult. Coordinating the most convenient times, settling on a practical location, identifying possible methods of transportation, and documenting who is bringing what to events is no easy feat. There is also no way of knowing how many people plan to attend a given event, which makes it difficult to determine how much of preparation is really necessary. Careful planning is especially crucial for highly attended events like parties, fundraisers, meetings, and trips. Unfortunately, there is no ubiquitous event-planning tool; most planning occurs through emails, phone calls, face-to-face encounters, and various social websites. We plan to optimize Facebook’s ‘Events’ application to help organize and delegate responsibility for events. What better way to plan an event than with the help of all of your close friends at your finger tips? Our solution is a new Facebook application called EventPlus, which includes guests in the event planning process. Attendees are able to volunteer to bring items, discover carpooling opportunities, and participate in polls to come to consensus on sensitive factors like the time or location of an event. This way, the event planning experience becomes more social and less monotonous. In addition, while Facebook events are ignored after the event has taken place, EventPlus stays active afterward to encourage an open dialogue of what could have been improved and to share stories and media from the event. With more than more than 2 million events created each month on Facebook, there is a massive repository of events with valuable information for event planners. Adding just one line of feedback to each of these events can go along way. Our design team is comprised of two undergraduate students and one graduate student with multi-disciplinary backgrounds including computer science, industrial engineering and management, human-computer interaction (HCI), and information systems. Drawn together by an understanding of the need for user-centered design and its all-important mantra, the designer is not the user, we worked to place ourselves in the users context to fully understand what people need rather than what we think would be desired. Working over a period of two months, we studied why people attend events, what determines a successful event, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of current methods of event planning. We conducted around 50 informal interviews around the Carnegie Mellon University campus, a web survey with 164 volunteered responses, and a thorough competitive analysis of existing event planning and invitation applications. Motivated from this data, we came up with a list of features and narrowed them down with affinity diagramming, user testing and the creation of a scenario. We broke down our resulting features into three primary sections:

Invitations: Increasing potential attendees through a more conspicuous listing of friends who may be attending, and prompting people to RSVP truthfully by modifying the selections.


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Planning: Encouraging attendees to participate in event planning by giving them a specific list of tasks to choose from, offering modes of transportation, and giving an option to voice their opinions.

Post-Event: Provide a centralized location for post-event discussion and media sharing as well as feedback for what could have been improved for helping people plan similar events.

Our deliverables include an interactive click-through of our design ideas, a scenario supported by a series of screenshots, and an open source Facebook wireframing template for Adobe InDesign, which can all be found on our project site: eventwand.com/FB. We plan to move forward with the development of this application next semester at Technion: The Israeli Institute of Technology with plans for a working beta version by the summer of 2009. We expect that through using EventPlus, people will use Facebook as a tool for more than just event invitations, but for effective social collaboration and insightful feedback resulting in more well-planned, enjoyable and memorable experiences.


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Scenario

Part 1: The Invitations Mark is planning a party for his friend Susan’s 21st birthday for the 5th of January. Like most college students in the US, Mark is an avid Facebook user and finds it to be a great way to stay connected with friends. Since most of his friends use Facebook, he decides to use a new Facebook application, EventPlus, to plan and invite friends to the Party. On January 1st, several days before the party, Mark creates a new event. He enters in “Susan’s 21st Birthday!” for the title. He then sees the optio n to poll the guests before choosing the rest of the event details. He decides it would be nice to have the guests more involved in the planning process and creates a poll, asking guests to vote on a location for the party. He provides options for a “House Party”, “Club” and “Pub crawl”. He carefully selects about 60 friends, hoping for at least 1/3 of them to actually come. John, one of Mark’s good friends, receives the invite and notices three new choices for the RSVP: “Yes, I will be there”, “I’m Interested”, and “Sorry, I can’t”. Under the choices there is a list of who is going. He doesn’t recognize any of the people, but decides to wait and check again later on. He selects “I’m Interested” because he does not want to commit to anything before knowing whom else is going. He is then prompted to take the poll and chooses “House Party” because he figures it would be a more intimate setting and tends to dislike the bar scene. His screen displays a personal thank you note from Mark for participating in the poll, informing him the results will show up in his news feed in a few days.

Meg, Susan’s friend, also receives the Facebook invitation to Susan’s 21st Birthday. She knows she will be attending the Party no matter what the circumstance, and clicks on “Yes, I’ll attend”. She indicates her preference for the house party and receives a similar thank you note.


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Skip, Susan’s cousin, receives the invitation already knowing that he will be out of town that weekend. He doesn’t want to hurt Mark or Susan’s feelings by saying no, but notices that ‘NO’ is no longer an option. He reads over the new options and selects ‘Sorry I can’t’, feeling that it is less offensive. On January 3rd, two days before the event, Mark decides to close the poll and view the results. He can see that the majority responded and preferred a House Party. John, who initially clicked on “I’m Interested”, receives a notification that 14 people are attending the event. His newsfeed is updated to show him that “Rachael, John, Marsha, and 5 other friends are attending Susan’s Birthday Party,” and that it will be at Mark’s House. He would hate to miss out on a party where so many of his friends are going and changes his RSVP to “Attending”.

Part 2: Planning & Preparation Because mark has selected ‘house party’ for the theme, he can now use the planning features available in EventPlus. He creates a list of items required for the party based on the preset template for ‘house parties’. He selects what he can manage himself and what he thinks other guests could contribute. He sees a notice about ‘related events’ with links to view other events that may have required similar planning. He clicks on ‘Kirsten’s 21st Birthday Bash’ and sees that people were upset that the party ran out of cups in the first hour. He increases the quantity needed of cups needed to prevent this from happening in the future. All guests who have said they’ll attend receive a notification with a link to the items page. This message will inform the guests that Mark needs help organizing the party and directs them to the event page with several new planning features highlighted.


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After receiving this notification, Meg clicks on the link that takes her to the events page. There she marks the check boxes next to chips and dip and enters in 2 bags, and 1 guacamole for the quantity she is willing to get. She chooses to be reminded “on the day of the event” by “Text Message”. She can also see who else has volunteered to bring items and notices that no one has volunteered to get wine. She clicks on wine and enters in 1 bottle.

A progress bar on the events page shows that they are only 10% away from completing their goal, so John decides he may as well contribute. He volunteers to bring the cake and a few bags of chips, and asks to be reminded “One night before the event” by “Email” to give himself time to buy them after receiving the reminder. Meanwhile, Meg realizes she has no way of getting to Mark’s house and would rather not walk by herself in the cold. Instead of having to fish through her phone book to call people that are attending, she browses the carpooling feature of the event page. Meg sees that John has an extra spot in his car, which will be leaving around 10pm from Margaret Morrison St. She signs up for the spot and leaves her cell phone for him to call her if needed.


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On the 4th, John receives a message from EventPlus reminding him to bring the cake so he places the order at a nearby bakery. On day of the event, Meg receives a text message, casually reminding her that she volunteered to get 2 bags of chips, 1 guacamole dip and a 1 bottle of wine. The same day, John is reminded that four people have signed up for a ride at Margaret Morrison St. at 10pm. Knowing exactly what they need to bring and how to get there, the event appears to have been well planned with only a few clicks.

Part 3: Post-event A day after the event, Mark is sent a Facebook message, prompting him to send thank you notes to everyone who attended. He is encouraged to use the post event features to make the event more memorable and to receive valuable feedback for the next time one of his friend’s turns 21. He remembers how helpful it was to view “Kristen’s 21st Birthday Bash” while creating this event, so he feels it is important to pay it forward by making sure people contribute. Mark decides to send the “Thank you” notes and enters his message using a template and clicks on “send to all attendees”. He then sends a separate and more personalized “Thank you” note to all the contributors. Both groups of recipients are requested to share photos and stories through the new Post-Event features of EventPlus within the thank you notes.

John and Meg receive Mark’s personalized message in their Facebook Inbox. Meg has pictures from the party that she had already uploaded, so she decides to link this photo album under the Media section of the post-event page along with a video of her friend Chris doing the moonwalk. John leaves a comment on the video, laughing at the failed attempt, and adds a few pictures of his own.


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The video of Chris reminded John of a funny story that occurred at the event that he wants to share with everyone who attended. He posts on the Stories section about Susan, who had milk fly out of her nose during Chris’ moonwalk. He then spots the feedback section where Mark has requested that people take a minute to write about their general thoughts on the party. John recounts that there were not as many girls as he had hoped, and Mark takes note of this for next time.

Mark, while happy with the event, was left with six bags of chips, three cans of salsa, two boxes of cookies, and four bottles of soda. He would like some place to store this information to remember for next time. He sees that in the post-event page, where the item list once was, is a new section asking to input leftover items and/or shortages. He lists the leftover items and also that he could have used more alcohol. Mark reflects on the post-event page and sees all of the potentially valuable information for other event planners. He tells his friends about his wonderful experience using EventPlus, hoping to increase the catalogue of events online and to find out what exactly it takes to throw a well-planned and successful event.


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Background Why Improve Facebook Events Our initial idea was to improve upon the existing Facebook application so that it helped the planners more. We thought including features that assist the host in the initial stages of planning would be a significant improvement to the existing Facebook Events application. We chose to improve Facebook events because it is the leading social networking site according to comScore. This would give us access to a large user base as Facebook has more than 130 million active users. While suggesting improvements to Facebook’s ‘Events’ application would guarantee that our work is used, it seemed more practical to create our own application using the existing application as a starting point as to receive unique downloads. We toyed around with having only a few select planners needing to install this application, but in the long run decided it would be better to have a higher download count if everyone is required to install it. This would give our app attention from the Facebook developers and the potential to be Interviews later also revealed that people liked using Facebook events since they could easily invite all their friends with a few clicks as most of their friends were already on Facebook.

Initial Interviews To support our decision we began conducting interviews with 3 people who had experience planning events. The questions we asked were:

• What is the name of the event you are planning / have planned? • How many people are expected to attend / did attend? • Describe the event... • Have you planned for this event in the past? • How soon do you start planning? • What types of things are challenging to plan for?

If the event had multiple planners we included the following questions:

• What tools (online or offline) did you / do you use to plan the event? • Do you have sub groups/committees to handle different tasks (e.g. PR,

finance, schedules, etc) • How often do you meet to plan the event?

We encouraged people to talk about the events without constraining them to the questions in an attempt to get more information about event planning.

Narrowing the focus: Formal events vs. Informal Events At this juncture, it also occurred to us that events could be categorized into two different groups on the basis of the type and level of detail required to plan them. We decided to call these two groups formal events and informal events. Formal events include events such as concerts, competitive events, and annual dinners for a social cause with a large gathering. Informal events are events like potluck dinner, house-warming party, barbeques, or planned trips with a few friends.


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From our interviews we noticed that formal event planners didn’t plan such events frequently. The list of people attending has more than several hundred names and the planning is often done in phases where separate groups of people plan different portions. This planning also takes place over a longer time span and some people in the planning group agree to oversee the details for a customized planning strategy. Our interviews for informal events suggested a higher frequency because the planning for these would often begin just one week in advance. People relied on past experiences to plan such events or would search for tips to plan the event on Google. These guest lists always included fewer people, and one person (the organizer) did most of the planning. When tasks were delegated, they were done through scattered phone calls or emails. The formal event planner group required different features as compared to what would help an informal event host. For example, the formal event planner may have required tools to help keep track of budgeting, assisting PR and advertisement like poster design tools, scheduling meeting times, and documenting planning notes. The informal event shares some of these needs, but the host mostly had trouble getting people to attend, requesting contribution to share the burden of planning a successful event, and making sure that the event is successful while not expending unnecessary time and effort planning it. We found that these two groups divided our user base. Creating an application to address the needs of both groups where the creator would choose the type or scale of the event in the beginning seemed like a good compromise, but heavily outside the scope of one semester’s work. Instead, we decided to narrow our focus to one of the two categories: Informal (casual) Events. After formally interviewing 15 people to figure out which events they attended or planned more often we found that Informal events were held on a weekly basis and people planned these more often. In a survey done for an application called Whisper, less than a quarter of the events people attended were planned weeks in advance (Hong et al, 2006). Furthermore, a study done by WaggleLabs in 2007 found 49% of all Facebook events to be parties. We found that there was less support available to informal event hosts. Formal events, despite the fact that more planning was necessary, had established procedures for that planning people seemed to fall into a routine with their planning tools like Excel and Word. Informed by our interviews, we did not anticipate a very large user base or frequent usage by existing users for an application that helped formal event planners.


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Site Design Wireframes After narrowing our focus, conducting a second round of interviews and having finished competitive analysis, we started creating wireframes for the new application. Using Adobe InDesign, we created our designs based on styles of the current Facebook Events application. In keeping with our decision to make incremental changes to the current event planning and invitation workflow, we added in the new features. Creating a scenario helped us refine the new event workflow. This scenario illustrates the primary concepts within our website. As previously mentioned, events planned most frequently on Facebook were Parties and more specifically, birthday parties (WaggleLabs 2007). Therefore, we created our scenario of our hypothetical user Mark planning a 21st Birthday party for a friend. The pages we created involved the event creation page, the invitation received page, the main events page and a new post-event page. On the event creation page we added helpful tips for the creator in an attempt to help him/her host a successful event. In a recent article in the New York Times, a man recounts his experience creating an event on Facebook with over 200 invites and 15 RSVP’d attendees (Niedzviecki 2008). The night of the event, only one person showed up. He writes, “700 friends and I was drinking alone.” Our adjustments of the creation page help prevent similar events from occurring by showing little tips about how to create an event and how Facebook plays a role in that creation. The invitations that guests receive were slightly changed for our design. We relabeled the RSVP options ‘Yes’, ‘Maybe’, ‘No’ to ‘Yes, I’ll attend’, ‘I’m interested’ and ‘Sorry, I can’t’. Profile pictures of friends who have clicked on “Yes, I’ll attend” are displayed under the invitation. The guest receives an automatic thank you from the creator after the RSVP and prompts them to take part in the planning activities. An items list to choose what to bring was added to the right hand panel. We used collapsible sections to keep the event page uncluttered with all of our new features. Another design idea added is a planning status indicator, which looks like thermometer. The guests who are contributing along with the items they have chosen to bring are displayed next to this progress bar. A map is added near the event description to give a quick visual indicator of the location. Choice of how to be reminded about the items to be brought is displayed under the items list. A section for polls can appear under the Items section on the left panel if the admin so chooses. Other features of the existing Facebook Events application are retained. The event page after the event has taken place is titled post-event page. ‘Discussions’ is relabeled to ‘Stories’. In the ‘Stories’ section guests are prompted with questions such as "Who was the funniest person?" or "Was the music good?" to encourage them to contribute. A poll is included on the right panel where the host can ask the guests to rate how much they enjoyed attending.


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User Testing We created paper prototypes for our design ideas and iterated twice over our design ideas. We conducted usability test with these paper prototypes with 3 subjects. We found that items list options on the right and the update on who brings the items at the center of the page felt like a disconnect to the users. The expectation was to show an updated list what the user volunteered bring under the item list. We would have done this, but we wanted to keep in line with Facebook’s visual schema of displaying details about the event on the left and active quick selections on the right. From observing design patterns in class we were more cognizant of these types of consistencies. To remedy this conflict, we highlighted the update that shows up when a user confirms the item he has chosen to bring from the items list. We also found that hiding the guest list confused users and we decided not to include this feature. A more detailed analysis of this finding can be found in the discussion section. Generally we had decided from the beginning to make only incremental changes to the current Facebook Events application to retain the look and feel, making the new application familiar and easy to comprehend. We conducted 2 think aloud studies for our design using the wireframes. We asked the user to voice all of their thought processes as they interacted with the prototypes when we gave them specific tasks or guided them through scenarios. We found the relabeling of ‘Yes’, ‘Maybe’ and ‘No’ to be a good idea. The first user felt that it is now closer to how she would naturally respond. Another user liked the ‘Bring items’ feature and said it would be very helpful for planning. While creating the wireframes we performed a cognitive walkthrough on our rough wireframes. This helped us create an overall design that would be easy for users to comprehend and use. This method is cheap and fast because it does not require users. Instead, we ask fundamental questions on the tasks moving from state to state to check that we are properly welcoming newcomers. This helped validate our tool tips and rewording of the RSVPs. Click-through To connect the different wireframes into a comprehensive experience for anyone who wished to explore our design, we used Adobe Flash to create a partial prototype. We’ve uploaded this onto our project site so people can click through it and get a feel for how this design works and how it varies from the existing Facebook. We used the click-through more for presentation purposes than for design iterations, but given more time we would’ve liked to create a highly functioning click-through to user test on and help validate our design ideas further.


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Facebook Wireframing Template

As part of our wireframing process, we realized that our work could help other people who may be developing Facebook applications. For this reason we’ve uploaded an open source (public domain) template to our project site based on the screens we created where those who own Adobe InDesign can quickly sketch up design ideas with a polished feel by moving around simple design elements with just a few clicks. We’ve organized the template into six sections:

Resources: A repository for all of the basic design elements used on Facebook. This can be used for creating just about any page.

Newsfeed: Template for the newsfeed section of Facebook. Includes the right panel of requests and applications as well as the navigation for sorting elements.

Event Invitations: Sample event invitation page.

Event Page: Sample event page without any EventPlus features.

Create Page: Step 1 of Facebook’s creating an event page.

Message: Facebook message, by default sent to all guests of a given event, but can be easily modified.

Given more time, we would have added more screen mock-ups. However, because our wireframes dealt mostly with the Events portion of Facebook, our template reflects this work. Regardless, our resources page allows a user to quickly create any page from Facebook so we did not find it necessary to repeat this work for them. We hope to continue this template and spread awareness of it’s existence, but before doing so we will contact Facebook to ensure we are not violating any copyright laws.


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Site Details

Invitations Friends Who Are Going

Description This will be implemented in 3 different places shown above. The invitation note will show your friends mini photos (if there is substantial amount of them that confirmed). The News feed will contain more information about events, noting your friends that are going to the event (vs. general participators as in current event app). In the Event page, you will have the option to see your friends who are going or all the people. The default will be the display of friends only provided there are at least 5 attending. Rationale One of the outcomes that we got from the interview that on an open events, people are tending to join an event, even when they where not invited directly, because they see that their friends are going in the news feed. By making the event more visible in the news feed it will encourage more participants to join, and will encourage contribution to the event page by existing participators. In our survey we found that more than 70% of people volunteered information that they attend an event based on whom else is going. Therefore, in the invitation page, people do not need to click on the event to see who of their friends are going; it displays the list immediately. Tradeoffs Too much news feed can cause it to be considered as “junk” if you are not interested in the event. We also had a big discussion whether to manipulate the feel of people who attending by using the Language Adjustments (see below). One option was to count both “Yes” and “I’m interested” as “friends who are coming or interested” and by that making the feel that a lot of people are coming. In our “think out loud” exercises with the paper prototype, it seemed to have been working, as people tended to attend events with this big number. But, as a part of our goal to cause the “Interested” people to make a decision before the event, we showed only the “yes” friends this number is obviously smaller. That resulted a backfire that made them think that a lot of people abandoned the event. (See Discussion)


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Language Adjustments

Description This feature changes Facebook’s current RSVPs of “Yes”, “No”, “Maybe”, to a more gentle approach of “Yes, I’ll attend”, “I’m interested” and “Sorry, I can’t”. Rationale One of our goals was to give the host a more realistic indication of who is coming to the event. We found that the majority of people respond by clicking on “Maybe” and the most common reason was “not to offend the host”. By changing the language from a somewhat rude “No” to a more polite, “Sorry, I can’t”, we hope that people who can’t come don’t feel as bad for saying “No”. We felt this was closer to what people would naturally say to a verbal invitation. The “I’m interested” phrase engenders more commitment than clicking on “Maybe”. In practice, this reduces the number of people who clicked ‘Maybe’ just to be polite, or just to be done with the RSVP. Our rationale was that since ‘I’m interested’ appears more binding than ‘Maybe’ and ‘Sorry, I can’t’ is more polite than ‘No’, we could reduce the number of people clicking on ‘Maybe’ for the wrong reasons. Tradeoffs The new language adjustment may cause a greater number of “No” responses, which may affect other people’s decisions and discourage them from attending the event. We are encouraging honesty here to show an accurate representation of attendees, but it is highly possible that Facebook thrives from these uncertainties. For example, having 400 maybes, even if only 50 will show up, is more promising than having 100 maybes with the same end-result and encourages people to continue to use the application.


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Planning Item List

Description The Item List allows any of the participators to take responsibility for one or more items that are listed, and to add items that they think are needed to the list. Using the event category that the user selects, the system automatically generates a generic item list for this event type as well as the recommended amounts. When a participator RSVPs for an event, the system prompts the user to add an item to the list while showing what his/her friends are currently bringing. This is also viewed in the event page such that the option of adding an item is always available to the user up until the event date. Rationale In our interviews we found that people are willing to bring item to the event, and that often causes them to feel obliged to attend. By adding this feature, we are encouraging people to participate in event planning. We also found that most of our respondents did not frequently attend events where they were requested to help contribute by bringing items. Our initial reaction was of dismay, but we realized that the respondents who attend such events were rarely undergraduate students. Few responses from graduate students hinted at age being a factor in this. To validate our hunch that users above 21 were likely to attend more events where they were requested to get items, we created a survey and asked people how many times in the past couple of months they had attended events where they were requested to bring items to contribute. Since our knowledge of creating good survey questions was limited (see ‘Discussion’) we didn’t realize that our question was ambiguous and struggled to validate this assumption. The survey had many people replying that they attended a fair number of such events, averaging close to one such event every two weeks. We also drew some inspiration from the class reading: ‘Why should I share?’ where we found support for our design to quantify the items requested because they mentioned that specific goals bring more valuable results than generally listing ‘please bring items to this event’. By individualizing the list and showing which of your friends are bring items, we help prevent social loafing and encourage users to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in having their items listed to friends. Tradeoffs If this event is not type of event for which an Items list is useful, a main design feature of our application will not be useful to the users.


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Carpooling

Description The carpool feature will allow each guest to add his own car, volunteering to take people to the destination. The user may also join another person’s car by selecting it from the list of cars that have free seats. Rationale Location and accessibility were 15 percent of the main factors for people attending an event based on our survey. We also found in the competitive analysis that EventWand offers a carpooling feature to handle transportation difficulties of event planning. By giving the participators an easy and convenient way to plan on how to reach the location, we make the event more accessible and encourage them to attend. Tradeoffs This feature raises many obvious privacy issues. When the guests for the event are not in your friend circle this feature cannot ensure that only your friends or the people you trust can request a seat in your car. Also many guests may not want to request seats in a stranger’s car and traveling with people they do not know may be considered unsafe. In such circumstances, this feature may not be used at all.


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Polls

Description The polls feature allows the host to ask question about the event planning (location, time, type etc.) each user can take a vote. After generating a poll, the participators will see it both in the requests page, were he can answer it right away, as well as in the event page. Rationale By letting the participators be a part of the planning process and the decision-making, they will feel more involved and may be more willing to participate in it (especially if they voted for the choice that wins). In the class reading ‘Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities’, we found support for the polling feature. We found that having guests take polls makes them feel more involved in the planning, thereby fostering a feeling of commitment that may compel them to attend the event. Tradeoffs This additional feature may add to visual clutter on the event page. Other than that there is no major drawbacks for a polling feature provided the host asks reasonable questions. We can potentially balance this flaw by having suggestions for polls or directing them to previous EventPlus events to find examples.


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Post Event Stories

Description The stories section allows people to share their experience from the event and encourages them to contribute stories. ‘Stories’ has an optional basic template that will make it very easy for the user to jot down some anecdotes from the event. The application will prompt the returning guest with questions such as, “What was the coolest thing?” or “Who was the hit of the party?” To spur people to start using ‘Stories’, the host is prompted to send a thank you note to the people who attended Along with the Thank You the users will also receive links to Post-event page in order to show them all the Post-event features. Rationale After the party there is a lot of activity that goes on regarding personal and group experiences. One of our goals is to encourage everyone to use the platform of the event in order to share these experiences. By prompting guests to revisit the event page, we draw the attention of the participators to the post-event features, and encouraging them to contribute to it further making the event memorable and a repository for all event related activity. Often a thank you note is polite gesture, and people may feel obligated to respond back to such a gesture. This will encourage them to contribute to the stories section and to the other post-event features. Tradeoffs Too many messages about an event may annoy the guests and be considered “spam”.


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Feedback

Description The feedback section allows the organizer and the participators to state what worked, what didn’t work, and have quick feedback polls. On the right top corner under the event image, a general poll is displayed where guests can indicate if the event was “Good”, “OK” and “Not Good”. On the left side the admin can ask specific questions like “Was there enough cups?” or “What can I change for next time?” Rationale Immediately after an event, people have in their minds a clearer view of how should have been done. By encouraging feedback we can get to goals to be accomplished. The first one is to have more knowledge for next event, by that making it better (feedback can be shared and ranked for other events as well). The second goal is to herd users to use the post-event page, and by that encourage participation for the other sections (Stories and Media Sharing). Tradeoffs The feedback may be too critical for the host and that may discourage him from organizing such an event again.


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Media Sharing

Description Media Sharing feature allows users to post pictures and videos from the event and keep the event page active a long time after the event has been completed. Sharing photos and tagging are powered with the option to add speech bubbles to encourage playful post-event activities. More than that, in order to make it easier for the users, you simply add a link to your photos and videos from other albums on your Facebook Profile under the post-event media sharing section so they are still yours and accessible outside of the event page. Rationale Media Sharing feature is one of the “post events” features that are included to help make the event more memorable. Currently sharing photos and videos from events is a decentralized process as participants upload these on their own profiles where not all attendees may be able to access the media. Sometimes these must be uploaded on to an events page for a separate media sharing application like Picasa or Flickr. We aim to centralize this into one location so all photos from an event can be viewed together rather than having to browse in different people’s profiles or hope that album’s appear in the newsfeed. This is a simple fix and we believe can largely encourage people to partake in other sections of the post-event page. A picture is worth a thousand words. They are much more appealing and many Facebook users spend most of their time viewing photos. We also combined videos with photos into media because we found that videos were rarely used in events and why not group them to prevent clutter. Tradeoffs Encouraging awareness of this new feature is something we struggled with. We message users, but for fear of spam hope that there may be more efficient ways like subtle newsfeed tips. We look forward to receiving more feedback on this feature in the future by directing people to our project site.


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Discussion Throughout the research and development of EventPlus, we learned a few valuable lessons about ideation and proof of concepts:

1. Do not include a design idea just because you spent a great deal of time on it 2. Creating surveys is no easy task; get help from an expert 3. Make the best with the skill-sets on your project team

The first lesson relates to a design concept we had gone as far as to include in our scenario before realizing we had no validation. In planning how to incorporate friends who are going into the event page, we explored multiple ways of encouraging people to attend an event. Initially, we simply showing friends attending right underneath the invitation a guest received as it is in our current design. This way the guests didn’t require to go to the events page and search through the ‘Attending’ list to find out which of their friends were attending. On further discussions, our professor, Jason Hong, suggested hiding the guest list for some amount of time to promote RSVPs from people who would normally wait until they see how many of their friends are attending, which may result in a ‘chicken game’ where everyone ends up waiting. This idea spawned from when people often hide the amount of money a charity is looking to raise until they are half way to make people feel like they are almost there and encourage contribution. At first, we thought it best to give the host an option to hide the guest list until some duration of time before the event. In this scenario, invited guests would not be permitted to view the responses of other guests. In our user testing of this concept, users were annoyed because the current Facebook event application allows them to view others responses. For fear of this being too drastic of a shift from the current Facebook, we iteratively changed this concept. In order to counterbalance the feeling of confusion of not knowing who would attend, we decided to show the number of people who had responded by clicking on ‘Yes, I’ll attend’ and also ‘I’m interested’ without showing the breakdown between these groups. This was necessary because since everyone continued to click ‘I’m Interested’, after the waiting period was over we were left with nothing different from the original application. We also decided to attach a small note saying that the guest list view was disabled by the host to inform the user of this deviation and potentially create intrigue. After the duration set by the host had passed, a notification would be sent to all guests stating that the guest list was now available to be viewed. After hours of discussion on this feature, we felt that we had no way of knowing how well and if this feature would work. We suspected that this might actually turn out to be a detriment to the new application. To test this we created more paper prototypes for the feature and tested it with five different users. All the users felt it was confusing that the number of people attending was shown and not who was attending. Three people didn’t notice that the groups ‘Attending’ and ‘Interested’ were clubbed initially and wondered why the ‘Attending’ list had shrunk later on once the list was revealed. One user said that they would just wait till the day the guest list was displayed, or they


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heard from their friends in person before deciding to attend. One user thought that hiding the guest list could lead to complications involving hurt feelings if people discussed the event offline to find out who was attending and some people found out they weren’t invited. Overall, user testing found that guests didn’t understand the rationale behind it and found it complicated. We also determined that the feature was outside our target events because there would not be enough time to wait for ‘casual events’. We heavily considered keeping it anyway because of all of the time we devoted to its concept, but in the end scraped this feature because it was in the best interest of our design. The second lesson relates our survey. We spent a lot of time advertising the survey to the campus, which we were happy to see resulted in 164 volunteer responses. While this is a high n-value to work with, we found that the questions could have been improved to receive more valuable results. None of us had course or work experience on survey creation, so it was no surprise to find that we received some negative feedback on the questions. In the open-ended questions, there were multiple accounts of responses along the lines of ‘this is a poorly phrased question’, specifically relating to: “How many times in the last couple of months have did you attend an event where guests brought item to contribute?” A statistics professor actually emailed us suggesting an alternative phrasing where we provide options like ‘most’, ‘several’, ‘few’, or ‘none’ to prevent responders from approximating. We also learned that rather than listing the ambiguous term of ‘couple of months’, we should have provided a specific number to prevent a wide spread of answers. The last, and potentially most important lesson from our experience working on EventPlus, is to always utilize the skill sets on your team. As opposed to the first two lessons where we learned things the hard way, this lesson is something we feel we did right. That is, we did not allow the scope of the development to handle any programming in the Facebook developer’s platform. It would be a waste of time to sit and teach our-selves the code. In the working world, we could just as easily present a solid design idea and contract developers to code it. Our design team was more focused on engineering and design, so we figured we should work together to tackle the problem and investigate the event planning experience as in depth as possible. We also began the project by asking each other what our strengths and weaknesses were so that we divided the work accordingly when possible. For example, one member volunteered to work on interviews while the other began taking the group design sketches and rendering them in a higher fidelity. All in all, we found that by working with what we have, we were able to get a lot more done. Next semester, we look forward to expanding our project team to fill in the gaps of our work experience.


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Conclusion and Future Work Our research of event planning, including competitive analysis, interviews, surveys and user testing, led to the design of a Facebook application supporting social collaboration for an enjoyable and memorable event experience. We believe we are in a profitable market because the only other Facebook application for event planning, Party Planner, has only 359 monthly active users, which is very minimal portion of the 130 million active users of Facebook (facebook.com 2008). Furthermore, EventPlus has a very small learning curve because the interface is similar to the original ‘Events’ application. With our added functionality like assigning tasks to guests and joining carpools along with our cleaner and more intuitive user interface involving collapsible sections, we are confident that we can pull in a few sponsors and developers to help finish this project. One of the members of our team, Eyal, is an exchange student from Israel at Technion: The Israeli Institute of Technology. There is a project course there that involves creating applications for the web where they provide initial funding if the design idea has a strong foundation. We plan to work virtually during the spring semester to collaborate on the next stage of development, which is to create a working beta version of the Facebook application using their custom platform. We also hope to iteratively refine the design with feedback from peers and future research. Two specific design ideas came up over the course of our interviews that we think would be useful to share: free food and event scheduling. The first is an idea that came from one of the open-ended questions from the survey that asked, “When choosing whether or not to attend an event, what are the most important factors.” Several respondents mentioned they attend events if there is free food. We wondered how one currently goes about finding such events. Whether it involves searching Facebook’s ‘open’ events, asking friends, or finding advertisements around campus, it seems that many times you have to look for events rather than the easier solution of having them find you. What if we could have a system where you receive a text message when the day of an event where ‘free food’ is present in the description. While walking back from class, maybe you receive a text saying ‘Free food in the library at 1pm!’ and rally up some nearby friends to hoard the goods. This is beneficial for both parties; the creator gets free advertising for an event that is usually in support of a fundraiser or spreading awareness of a club, and the attendee gets the obvious benefit of free lunch. The second idea came from an interviewee who repeated mentioned that the most difficult part of planning an event is figuring out everyone’s schedules. While we partially solve this design idea with a polling feature that would allow the user to ask the users when they would prefer to meet, there seem to be more optimal solutions for the problem at hand. While observing a peer’s presentation on a course scheduling system, we wondered if we could collaborate to advertise events on a schedule. What if you could save the effort of polling guests for a good time by having the event parse through people’s schedules already to find available slots? There are some existing systems like timetomeet.info, which allows users to find blocks of free convenient meeting times. We would love to explore some of these systems to incorporate into EventPlus as part of the event planning process.


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References Fiesta Capstone Project. Gmail Add-On for Event Planning http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/M-HCI/2007/Google/index.html Ling, K., Beenen, G., Ludford, P. J., Wang, X., Chang, K., Li, X., et al. (2005). Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 10(4), np. Niedzviecki, Hal. "Facebook in a crowd." NY Times 24 Oct. 2008. 29 Nov. 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26lives-t.html Putnam, R. D. (1995). Tuning in tuning out: The strange disappearance of social capital in America. PS: Political Science and Politics, 28(4), 664-683. Using Technology to Coordinate Social Events. Professor Jason Hong’s Research. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/publications/CHI2006-wip-whisper-submitted.pdf Wasko, M. M., & Far, S. (2005). Why should I share? Examining social capital and knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice. MIS Quarterly, 29(1), 3557. "Facebook | Statistics." Facebook. 2 Dec. 2008 <http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>. "Facebook Events." Waggle Labs. 7 Dec. 2007. 9 Nov. 2008 <http://www.wagglelabs.com/2007/12/12/facebook-events>


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Appendix

^ http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/mhci-capstone-project-fiesta

^ http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/event-planning-guide-osu


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^ http://www.wagglelabs.com/2007/12/12/facebook-events


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Whisper Survey Results

^ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/publications/CHI2006-wip-whisper-submitted.pdf


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Item List Support

“Hypothesis 6, which predicted that members given specific numeric goals would rate more than those given do-your-best goals, was supported. Subjects rated 27% more movies when given one of the specific goals than the nonspecific do-your-best goals (z=.2.87, p<.01). Moreover, the marginally significant group goal specific goal interaction (z=1.67, p<.10) indicates specific goals had a larger effect in the individual-goal condition than in the group condition.” (Wasko, M. M., & Far, S. (2005))


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Polling Support

“Individuals contribute knowledge to electronic networks of practice when they perceive that it enhances their professional reputations, and to some extent because it is enjoyable to help others. They contribute when they are structurally embedded in the network, and when they have experience to share with others.” (Ling, K., Beenen, G., Ludford, P. J., Wang, X., Chang, K., Li, X., et al. (2005))


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Scenario Character Summary

Character Role Typical RSVP

Ideal RSVP

Motivations

Susan 21st Birthday

N/A N/A Wants to have a good and memorable experience.

Mark Creator, Host of the Event

Attending Attending Wants a big attendance, but also wants an honest representation of the attendees.

John Mark’s Friend

Maybe Attending Has other options for the weekend. Determining factor is likely who else is going.

Meg Susan’s Friend

Attending Attending Definitely going, would like to help out in some way.

Skip Susan’s Cousin

Maybe Not Attending

Does not want to make Susan or Mark feel bad. Does not want to draw attention to himself for not going.


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Our Survey Results


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NOTE: Open-ended results can be found on our project website: eventwand.com/FB


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Interview Highlights

Why do you attend an event?

“I go to an event if I know the host well”

“I usually attend if I’ve heard about the event from my friends before I get the Facebook invitation”

“I attend events that have an interesting title” “I go if I’m interested in the event... Like blood donation”

“I go if my friends are going and if it sounds interesting”

How do you most often respond to an event invitation on facebook?

“I mostly click on Maybe”

“I just let sit there till the event is over”

“I go if I have time... I wish Facebook had some kind of scheduling tool”

“I just click maybe... Because I don’t want the host to feel bad”

“I don’t want to be rude... By clicking on ‘No’”

When was the last time you attended an event where guests contributed items? (i.e. food/drinks)

“Last month”

“I can’t remember”

“3 months back”

EventPlus

Documents

Transcript of EventPlus