Jon Plummer

I received an eVite today, the first in a long while. It was not a great experience.

Strike one: lack of context. The HTML email message was pretty, but nearly information-free: it contained the sender’s name, the name of the event, and a smattering of descriptive text (that the sender deliberately kept short). No location, no time, no date; for those I would have to click through to eVite.com.

Without at least the date I couldn’t assess the urgency of the message. Is it something I need to deal with right away? Can it wait until I get home and put my daughter to bed? Can it wait for a few days, maybe until the weekend? The most important information an invitation ordinarily carries is actually hidden! Furthermore, not all of the invite graphic is clickable; a faiir portion of it is not. Obligingly, I found a clickable portion and clicked through.

Strike two: poor prioritization. The most prominent elements in the page at eVite.com are the ones I care about the least. In order of apparent priority (what draws the eye first):

1. The main graphic for the invite
2. “Guest Options” links (mostly useless or out-of-place)
3. eVite logo and tabs
4. Two ads from the University of Phoenix
5. The guest list
6. “Reply here” box
7. A “New! Send to Phone” button
8. “Plan your next event”
9. “Free eVite Cards”
10. Footer navigation and administrivia
11. Information about the event, including venue, time, date, and blurb.

That’s right, the very reason I came to the page is the LEAST prominent segment of the page. For a moment there I didn’t even see it, and was ready to accuse eVite of completely fouling things up. As it is, they’ve taken the part of the experience that I care about the most, and shown that THEY care about it the least. This is backward.

Des Traynor points out that a quick way to evaluate the user-centeredness of a page is to grey out the portions that the user doesn’t care about, and see what you have left. Rather than do that, I’ll desaturate the page and highlight the parts I DO care about with big yellow boxes.

(I’ve obscured parts of the image that identify other folks.) There’s a lot there that I don’t need, and most of it is high on eVite’s priority list. The meat of the page, the main event, the reason this page exists at all accounts for (charitably) 28% of the real estate and much of it is de-emphasized.

Strike three: poor organization. eVite’s difficulties with the prioritization if the invite page probably mask other usability and appeal problems that appear there, mostly due to the “I give up” “Guest Options” box of links that appears to the left of the Guest List. Guest Options contains a jumble of links related to disparate user tasks and far-flung parts of the interface. “Invite more people” and “Remove me from guest list” are strongly conceptually associated with the Guest List, while “Send a free Evite eCard” and “Go to Carpool Page” are not (and are heralded elsewhere). None of these are “guest options” so much as additional or alternate functionality, and they should be treated in context with the content they seek to modify or operate on.

It will be difficult to put these functions in their proper places until the prioritization is fixed, but here are a few additional suggestions:

• “Send to Phone” and “Add to my Outlook Calendar” are most strongly related to the “When” portion of the invite. “Add to Calendar” is really only useful if I plan to attend or am a “maybe,” so making these options part of the reply form is another option.
• “Email me when Guests Reply” (what’s with The Bizarre capitalization?) appears as a link in “Guest Options” and as a check box on the reply form. The check box should be sufficient, although eVite has bloated this functionality by allowing you to further choose to watch only specific invitees.
• If we believe in direct manipulation, “Remove me from Guest List” probably should go with my entry on the guest list.
• “Go to Carpool Page” is a problem; it suggests that I’ll be taken away from the invite. Maybe I’ll lose my place? Already I am disinclined to click the link, although it may prove useful.

Strike four: print. The parts of the invite I am likely to want to print include the title, venue/date/time/blurb, host name and contact information, and (perhaps) the guest list. Using the “Print Page” just fires window.print(); , printing the entire page including the (useless on paper) tabs, “Guest Options” links, “send to phone” button, footer, ad banners, and reply form, with nary a print style sheet in sight. Easy to implement, sure, but NOT USEFUL. And a lightly-populated eVite prints on two pages with all of that needless content because the footer bloated with “partner sites.”

But wait, there is more.

1. The “Yes/No/Maybe” radio buttons in the reply form have unintended consequences. Selecting anything other than “Yes” disables the “I’m interested in carpooling” check box. But what if I am a “maybe” until I can get a ride? Trying to fake out the system by checking the box and THEN selecting “maybe” fires an annoying alert(); complaining that “You cannot participate in carpool if you select no or maybe.” Umm, thanks. Watch me! I’ll get a ride with someone, and we’ll point and laugh at the eVite carpool cops when they come to arrest me.
2. Out of curiosity I click on the “more info” link next to the “I’m interested in carpooling” checkbox. The page grows to include a little text telling me that I should continue clicking to learn more. isn’t that why I clicked “more info” in the first place? Weird.
3. Some of the ancillary functionality fires popups, and some of it takes me away from the invite. There seems to be no standard; “Invite More People” navigates away from the invite, and therefore away from the context I might need to choose people to invite (such as the Guest List, yeah?), while “Email me when Guests Reply” fires a popup that contains the guest list. I’ve given up trying to guess the reasoning behind these decisions.
4. “Add to my Outlook Calendar” fires the download of a VCS file. What if I use iCal? Google Calendar? Notes? Can I get an ICS, anyone?
5. It turns out that the “Go to Carpool Page” does take me away from the invite; it shows me a pretty map and has ABSOLUTELY NO CALL TO ACTION whatsoever until I notice that at the top there is a tiny message claiming that “You must reply ‘Yes’ to this invitation to join a carpool.” Thanks so much for your help.

Make no mistake, eVite is trying to do a lot on this page. But it does not appear that they have chosen carefully which of these things to emphasize and streamline for their users, nor have they chosen any particular facet of the experience to do particularly well. The overall flavor is that of an organization attempting to compete on the length of its feature list rather than the usefulness of any one core combination of those features.

I haven’t replied to the eVite yet, nor have I sent one of my own. If this episode is typical of the eVite experience, I’ll have more to write very soon.