event management

A routine branding exercise went awry early Friday in Brooklyn when Growing Venture Solutions performed a "mind map" exercise to aid in the creation of logos for two of their flagship products, the Scout hosted sercurity review service and COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution for Drupal.

"Connecting to the unintellectualized, visceral, gut responses we get from each logo helps us maximize branding potential so that we can produce marketing collateral that's sure to engage members of our target market segments, helping them to connect to each brand at an emotional level, which results in increased conversions" said social media expert Robert H. McJellyPants. He added, "Tachyon converter beam subspace electron resonance tuning."

Unfortunately, while exercise participants were discussing their friendly, communal associations with schools of smiling fish in the COD logo, as well as some of the more stern, defensive associations evoked by the Scout owl logo, the owl took flight and picked up the fish, instantly crushing the fish's vital internal organs with its beak.

Illustration by Carl Wiedemann.

Needless to say, participants were horrified at the sudden attack by the owl but impressed by its swift, decisive action in the face of what the owl saw as a potential security risk to its personal website, SupercuteCatsWearingWigsandSmallDressesTailoredEspciallyforCatsNoThisisnotajoke.com/website.

Ezra Glidesgame has been writing a module to integrate the Signup module for managing event registration with the Ubercart e-commerce module: Signup integration for Ubercart (short name: uc_signup). The uc_signup registration process was designed to support a wide variety of use cases (one user potentially signing up multiple other users for different events, in different quantities) while still being easy to use. We wanted to see what users thought of the preliminary uc_signup registration process, so in June we ran a small usability test here at the Growing Venture Solutions office. The test revealed several subtle and interesting findings that applied to the uc_signup module, the Ubercart checkout process, and specific aspects of the client site's configuration.

First, some background on the project

AUSSIE provides professional development in the field of K-12 education. One of their services is to offer workshops around the country, with registration done through their website. Uc_signup is being written to give AUSSIE more control of the look and administration of their sign-up process, and internalize their events management, which is currently being hosted by Eventbrite. The improved Aussie site is scheduled to launch in August.

About our Usability Participants

We recruited 4 participants having the following profile characteristics:

• Two men and two women between the ages of 29-36
• All with general office experience and good computer proficiency
• All use the internet daily, with a range of 3 to 40 hours per week
• Internet purchasing comfort level: comfortable to strongly prefer
• Three of the participants had previously signed up online for classes or workshops