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Goovite Meeting Maker; asking for your comments
Feb 24, 2006
A few months ago I announced my "good invite" system, or Goovite.com, to the Good Experience community - making it available, with no fee, and no ads, for you to immediately become more productive in your scheduling (and RSVP-tracking) of meetings, parties, and other events.
Now I'm happy to announce a brand new Goovite feature that I believe will make a real difference in the productivity of knowledge workers across the world.
As I've continued exploring "bit literacy," my method for personal productivity in the digital era, I've found that a lot of people spend too much time scheduling meetings among several people. Everyone has busy schedules and it often takes an irritating amount of time and effort to find a shared opening on everyone's calendars.
(Of course, if everyone coming to the meeting uses Outlook, or the company intranet, or some other shared system, there might be a feature that might work well enough to schedule everyone automatically. But then, what about the common meetings where everyone is not on the same system?)
Thus I've launched a meeting maker function in my Goovite.com tool. You might already know Goovite.com is a free, simple, easy tool for sending invites and tracking RSVPs. Until now Goovite only allowed you to send invites for events for which you already know the day and time.
Now, however, the Goovite Meeting Maker allows you to list several possible dates and times; Goovite then asks the invitees to indicate their availability for each possibility. You (as inviter) can then track their responses, finalize the Goovite on the best choice of day and time, and then track everyone's RSVPs to that choice.
One caveat, of course, since Goovite Meeting Maker is brand new: it's not perfect. In fact, I hope you go, use it, and see just how imperfect it is, because I want your help.
The readers of this newsletter are some of the most talented and accomplished user experience professionals in the world - what better resource to quickly get this tool up to speed as the rest of the world begins to use it?
So: I challenge you, the Good Experience community, to write me back (or post comments) to let me know how the tool should improve - what tactical flaws do you want fixed, and what strategic changes you'd suggest. Of course, no guarantees... but I want to open this up to comments from everyone, so we can work on improving this together.
Goovite Meeting Maker: http://www.goovite.com/mm
Please let me know what you think.
(And as always with the Goo tools, it's really Goo'vite - short for Good Experience Invite - "from the makers of Gel". Have a goo' time!)
A year ago I started building a similar application - and have not had time to finish it. Meanwhile, several other apps have arrived on the scene, including yours (very nice) so I'm forced to just hang up my hat. wah :(
This is such a true everyday business - and you've put it together well.
Goovite is goo!
However, a suggestion might be to add a landing page to the response module so that the responder is not staring at the submit button again. That is, unless you want the responder to be able to place multiple responses.... Hmmm...
Another suggestion might be to allow degress of "stealthness". Perhaps the inviter does not wish the responders to see who else has responded and the status of the response?? Maybe Sally won't go to the baby shower unless Joanne is there too??? I dunno.
I love it's simplicity!
I dig this b/c it's so clean. Thanks!
Suggestions:
- Allow people to resend invites to remind people of the event
- Allow the organizer to sign up for alerts so organizer gets pinged when people have rsvp'd
And I agree with the suggestion about offering a stealth mode for organizer to decide whether to reveal invite list or not.
Rock on!