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The user experience of online invites
The WSJ considers the user experience of online invitation sites. From: On the Internet, Everyone Knows Your RSVP List:
Topher Larkin, an administrative coordinator from Los Angeles, went on Evite to ask friends to his 25th birthday party. Days before the party, he was caught off-guard by a bunch of "yes" phone-call replies from guests who shunned the Web site because they didn't want others to know they planned to attend.
Actually, I wonder if they shunned the evite site because it's hard to use and jam-packed with advertising.
People should use Goovite.com instead: free, easy, no registrations, no ads.
And the WSJ should do more research next time!
(Thanks, Anne)
I was actually the UI designer for Evite when that version of the invite launched way back in fall of 2000. It was my first UI-realted job title. Yes, its basic structure is six years old save for about 2/3 of the ad units. Of course back then it also seemed like a good idea to employ 70 people to make it happen and that's what led to the company being sold to Ticketmaster and basically put in maintenance mode from a product development perspective.
I'm not ashamed of it, it was a great challenge to try to deliver good design weighed against the need for customization by the user and a need for more advertising and our whole design and PM team worked very hard to make it happen. It just fails to incorporate the last half-decade of good user experience thinking. Sadly we had an entire new structure for creating the invitations based on a lot of customer feedback and user research but we never got to launch it.
Isn't the aversion to eVite the fact that after viewing an invitation, coincidentally a bunch of really offensive spam starts arriving in one's email inbox?