Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

For Easter, we hosted family and friends at our house for lunch. Typically, we do it pot luck style everyone bringing a dish or two. This year, I decided to do an evite to coordinate the responses and who's bringing who and what.

I logged into Evite, picked an "easter-like" invitation template, entered my info, added my guests, made of list of items for them to select to bring with their RSVP and sent the invitations. To my disappointment, no one signed up to bring food and 3 people called me to ask me what time to come saying they couldn't find it on the invitation (even though it was there). I went back to the invite to see what the problem was. Here's what I found:

1) Poor Readability: Font color with event details too closely matched the background making the time of lunch nearly impossible to read. (The result, the individual bringing our ham arrived 45 minutes late!!!)

2)Improper grouping and ordering of response fields: "Please select something to bring" was below the "Will you attend" and comment fields (which is what people were expecting to do as part of their RSVP). The placement after ancillary "feature" fields like "I'm interested in carpooling" and "Email me when Guests Reply" makes the field even easier to miss.

3) Necessary fields not required: Since "Please select something to bring" wasn't required, when people didn't see it there was no prompt to remind them.

Here's a wireframe for my redesign of the invitation.

It features:

• Improved color contrast
• Re organized response fields (response and attendee acount fields related together)
• Inclusion of instructions in message body
• Addition of "add to ical" functionality
• Decreased emphasis in non essential "new" functionality.
• "Date" and "time" specific labels instead of generic "when" label