Punchbowl Blog

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

Our latest site update includes many new and exciting enhancements. We’re particularly happy with the new polish that we’ve given to “guest view” (how the invitation is seen by your guests). We processed a ton of feedback from hosts and guests alike to create a better guest experience. Here are the highlights:

• Top header redesigned for a cleaner look

• Tab design updated for a better user experience

• “Continue” and “Previous” buttons at the bottom of each screen for smooth navigation

• Better layout for Save the Dates

Check out a screenshot:

Be sure to ask your guests what they think when you plan your next event!

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

I was reminded of the popular Saturday Night Live Weekend Update segment “Really!?!” when I came across this page the other day.

I was setting up an online account for my pet insurance policy, when I was presented with this screen:

Really VPI!?! You know people don’t want info from your partnership companies so you switched the position of the choice required to decline this… Really!?!

This also makes an awkward double - negative phrasing that requires me to state “Yes, don’t send me information from VIP’s partnership companies.”

Really!?!

If you ever find something like this on MyPunchbowl, run, because we’ve been abducted by aliens.

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

We get a lot of feedback on the site and we try to respond to each and every email. This can be a lot of work, but the benefits are clear. Communicating with our users helps us keep a pulse on things that they find confusing or difficult to use on the site. We take that knowledge and use it to improve site design.

I was just recalling a nice and clean example of this “cycle” that involved the Invitation Options page. When you create an invitation on MyPunchbowl, we offer some great options for customizing how your guests view and interact with the invitation. These options are controlled on the host’s Invitation Options page.

Here’s what the page used to look like (click to enlarge):

This design got the job done, but I fielded a lot of questions from users such as “Can I show who’s invited on my invitation?”, or “I don’t want guests to bring other people, is there a way to turn that off?”.

These things were in the interface, but people were missing it.  So we came up with a better design (click to enlarge):

The questions all but stopped. Why is this design better?

• Sections - the settings are broken into major sections (Display, Guests, Reminders, etc). This makes it easier to digest the page as you glance over it.

• Wording - as opposed to a statement with a “true/false” checkbox we phrased the items as questions. This is more natural to read and easier to understand.

• Examples - see those “More Info” links on the right side? Those open a pop-up with an example picture of the setting. It always helps to see a picture, as most people are visual learners!

• Background - Dark text on a light background is easier to read, and I think you’ll agree this page looks nicer.

Hope you enjoyed this - keep the feedback coming!

Last week we launched a new page that’s linked from the MyPunchbowl home page. On this new MyPunchbowl “learn more” page, you can find out more about the key features and functionality of MyPunchbowl. Our team is really happy with how this page turned out for a few reasons:

1. First, we found a great place on our home page to place the “Learn More” link. We designed a “page curl” at the top of the page which reveals the link to the learn more page. Take a look at the MyPunchbowl home page to see the page curl. Note that it doesn’t detract from the overall look and feel of the page.
2. Once you click on the learn more link, the “Learn More” page provides a prospective user with a quick overview of the key features of the site at a quick glance.
3. The learn more page provides the same look and feel as the home page, providing a seamless experience for a visitor
4. Each of the sections on this page provides a screenshot of the feature (click the “View an example” to see a screenshot).
5. This page does a nice job of showing off some nice designs that are easy to create using the unique MyPunchbowl Design Studio. I’m really happy that users can see what’s possible with our site even before signing up for an account.
6. The learn more page includes a section of frequently asked questions. We tried to pick the top FAQ’s that we are typically asked by people who haven’t yet seen the website. We’re able to communicate a lot of information in a small amount of space.
7. At both the top and bottom of the page, there is a “Sign up for a free account” button which not only stands out on the page, but also provides a direct link to the MyPunchbowl Sign Up page.

Designing a page that accomplishes all of the above in only one page takes coordination between our lead designer, our user experience expert, our marketing diva, and our developers. Here’s a quick screenshot to give you an idea of how nice the page looks:

We’re all really proud of how this page turned out, and I hope you’ll take a look at the MyPunchbowl learn more page and let us know what you think. To share your thoughts, simply leave a comment on this blog post. Thanks!

This morning, we announced a brand-new version of MyPunchbowl.com. We’re very excited about this new release — it’s a complete face-lift of the site and we’ve added a few new features as well. It’s been quite a team effort, and we’re all really proud of what we’ve accomplished. It’s hard to explain how good it feels to ship a new release after months of feature spec’ing and testing, and this one feels better than most. We would love to hear your feedback: particularly we would love to know what you think about the overall new look as well as the new theme selector. To send us feedback, click “Feedback/Support” at the bottom of any page on MyPunchbowl.com. So what are you waiting for? Go check out our new release and start your holiday party planning!

Follow the link for the press release….

MyPunchbowl gets a face-lift in time for holiday party planning

———

Party Planning and Online Invitations with MyPunchbowl

This morning I came across an interesting post from the founder of Fog Creek Software, Joel Spolsky. Joel wrote about his experience dealing with a web design firm. Writing about his new web design Joel wrote, “We’ve been tweaking it and polishing it and changing things carefully, and the firm we hired to design it has been taking us step-by-step through information architecture, site maps, wireframes, initial designs, and several rounds of design. All with a carefully-designed process to get our buy-in at every step along the way. And so far every step I thought the design was converging and we’d get a nice web design out of it. And then I came back after a week on the road, took one look at it, and thought, oh crap. We can’t go public with that.”

I read this post and chuckled. This exact phenomenon has happened to me numerous times as I’ve developed software user interfaces and marketing campaigns. It’s frustrating for the people you work with. In many cases, just like Joel, people around me have gotten my buy-in all along the way. And then bam! I take a fresh look at it and no longer like it.

So why does this happen? I think there are a bunch of factors that lead to this kind of a moment. Here are a few:

1) We’ve all lost sight of the “main” thing: In my opinion, a good design clearly points the user to the main purpose of the page. In the times where I’ve had the “just not right” feeling, I look at the design and think to myself “I don’t see the main point of this page.” That’s a clear sign.

2) It doesn’t feel right: The reality is that we all have our own sense of what “feels right.” If it doesn’t feel right to you, then you just have to fix it.  Joshua Porter wrote today that “people make sense to themselves.” I agree. And people know for themselves what looks good and feels right. When you’re the final decision maker (like Joel), it’s critical that you know when to say “this doesn’t look right.” The key is choosing when and how to say that, and to not do it too frequently (unless you want to really piss off the designers and engineers).

3) It doesn’t look as good as Blahblah.com: I don’t care what your process of design is, but if at the end of the day you look at your design and then you look at someone else’s design and you feel inferior, then you have to go fix it. I’ve been in this situation many times. We *thought* we were on the right path, but the final product simply didn’t look as good as something else we had seen. The key to communication with designers is to clearly explain why you think Blahblah.com is better — and be as specific as possible. The better you can articulate the differences, the more likely they are to work with you to fix the design.

I applaud Joel for recognizing that sometimes you have to stop the presses and revisit your design. Even if you are “on board” all of the way through the process, you have to be truly happy and proud of the final product. After all, users don’t have the insight to see the process along the way. They only see the final product. And it better be great if you want to keep them as users.

Sean here, the other founder of MyPunchbowl.

Let’s see, its been about 9 months since my last post - yeah, I’m right on schedule! You see, I like to keep my posts very infrequent and rare so that they appreciate in value … sort of like a classic Ferrari.

Speaking of Ferraris, I’ve noticed Matt likes to draw real world :: startup analogies in this blog, so I thought I’d do it my way. I’m a car guy, you see. I like knowing about cars, working on cars, and dreaming about cars that I can’t afford (that’s where Ferraris fit in).

Soooo, ahem, “Running a web startup is like maintaining your car”. Oh wait, I’m supposed to do the “top 5 reasons why” … ok then:

1 - You’ve got to be in tune to know when something is wrong

Sometimes I’m driving with a friend and they hear a strange sound coming from my car (hey, its got 187,000 miles on it!). They say “what is that rubbing sound?” I say “you mean the rusty strip on the rear brake rotors? Yeah, I know about it”. Or, more often I’m driving my car and I hear, for example, a soft whistling from the corner of the driver’s side window. It turns out the rubber window seal needs adjustment. No one else would ever have known that or even heard the noise, but I’m in tune with my car.

How does this relate to startups? We spend so much time with MyPunchbowl that we know it like an old car we drive every day. When users write in and say, for example, “I stopped being able to see how many friends my guests were bringing” we know to tell them they accidentally unchecked “Allow guests to bring up to _____ friends each” in the RSVP options section. Like a strange noise in my car, I usually have an idea of how serious a user’s problem is very quickly.

2 - You’ve got to be realistic

Developing MyPunchbowl.com is a balance between the slick, cutting edge “theoretically possible” features, and what makes sense and is reasonable. Could we build a feature that text messages a YouTube video of you singing your invitation over the instrumental-only track of the latest Beyonce single? Yes, in theory. But maybe we’ll start with just plain texting your invitation.

Likewise, am I going to pay $2000 to replace the clutch packs in my AWD transmission because I experience a little torque bind in tight corners? Probably not at this point since that’s half the value of my car. I’ll take the more realistic option of turning off the AWD when I don’t need it (98% of the year). My point is, decisions like this are presented to us all the time (the website one, not the transmission one). It’s up to us to balance all the possibilities, and choose the best realistic path.

That’s enough for now … did I say top 5 reasons? You’ll have to stay tuned for the other 3. Don’t worry, it should be a short 9 or 10 months from now. Until then, check your oil, don’t ride the clutch, and don’t drive slowly in the left lane. Oh and make cool websites.

My co-founder (Sean) and I spent lots of time designing MyPunchbowl.com well before we hired any software engineers. It’s sometimes amusing to think about how much time we spent in front of the whiteboard– but we believe that products should be designed first, then implemented. Of course there is a balance. You can’t design every detail about a feature before you begin implementation. Many times the nuances about a particular feature only are clear when you have a chance to actually use it. So how do you guide your decision-making as you are tweaking a feature?

For us, we developed an internal mantra that helps guide our decision-making. It’s a mantra that I remind the team of often. It’s an important guiding principle. Our mantra is simply this: Help the host look good.

This may seem like an easy mantra to implement, but it’s not. As we make design decisions, we constantly have to make tradeoffs between what is better for guests and what is better for hosts. Using this mantra, these decisions become easier. Here’s an example: our RSVP options are all based on helping the host look good. There are other ways to implement these RSVP features that might be better for guests, but we believe that our role at Punchbowl.com is to help hosts look good. This mantra makes hard design decisions much easier.

It’s great when we get validation from real customers. Chris from Idaho recently wrote to us: “We used MyPunchbowl for our first family reunion in 20+ years and everyone, I mean everyone, was totally satisfied with the MyPunchbowl invitation. Our reunion was in Seattle (and I’m in Idaho) and because of your site/service it made me look so GOOD! Thanks for making it so Fabulous! Chris from Middleton Idaho.”

I’m convinced that all great products have mantras.

What’s your product’s mantra?

One of things that we try to do at Punchbowl.com is to build our software so that we can improve the product quickly. Templates and themes is a great example.

When we built the “Pick a Theme” page, we carefully made sure to build a robust back-end system so that we could create more templates quickly. This means that without any programming or additional software development, we can create new templates and push them “live” to the site very fast. Because of this technology, we’re literally adding dozens of templates every week.

The part about this that is really rewarding is that users have been emailing us template ideas, and we’re able to respond very quickly. Brian emailed us early this week asking for a “Hockey” template. Here’s what we made for him (within a few hours):

What templates or themes do you want? Go to Punchbowl.com and click on the “Feedback” link (bottom of page) to let us know. We’ll get it made quickly!

Well, file this under “holidays for the esoteric.” Tomorrow is Pretzel Day. Don’t ask me why. I’m sure some lobbyist for Bachman Pretzels was involved.

At MyPunchbowl.com we want to help you celebrate. That’s why we are the only website out there that has a template for your Pretzel Day celebrations. Grab some beer, buy some pretzels and invite your friends over. And tell them MyPunchbowl gave you the idea.

Here’s our Pretzel Day template:

Start your next party at Punchbowl.com!