Introducing Attendance on Mobile Web!
Each year, we invite exceptional Computer Science students to intern at Meetup. They work on product teams alongside full time engineers, as well as complete an end-to-end project related to the Meetup platform. This year, our interns tackled a feature our members have been asking for: an attendance tool on mobile web.
The Interns:
Casey Caruso, UI Engineering intern and rising Senior at Lehigh University
Emily Eng, UI Engineering Intern and rising Senior at Tufts University
Selecting a project:
While brainstorming ideas for our summer intern project, it was important to us that we implement a feature that would truly improve members’ experience with Meetup. We looked closer at the role of Meetup organizers and reevaluated the tools we were giving them to manage their Meetups. In doing so, we discussed the reality that many organizers are interested in tracking member attendance. Taking attendance allows them to distinguish loyal members, lets them better anticipate the turnout at future Meetups, and enables them to run a more successful Meetup group overall. Although Meetup had an attendance management tool on desktop, there was no mobile web feature, leaving organizers unable to take attendance on their phones at the most sensible time: as people walk in to their Meetup. We wanted to provide organizers with the ability to take attendance conveniently on-site of a Meetup on their mobile devices. Out of all the ideas that came out of our brainstorm, this was a clear winner since a mobile attendance tool is a feature that organizers have specifically requested in the past.
The Development Process
The initial design of the mobile attendance tool was simple. It had a list of members with corresponding checkboxes, the members being anyone who had RSVP’d yes to the Meetup, and above the list was the current count of how many people were marked as attended. In the nav bar, there was an X button on the left to return to the event page and a magnifying glass icon on the right that revealed a search bar so that organizers could search for a member in their group if he or she showed up to the Meetup without RSVPing.
A technical challenge that we faced while building this tool was making sure that we were coding smartly, reusing existing code where possible. So, for the search portion of the attendance tool, we decided it would be a good idea to reuse some of the code that had already been implemented for the search tool in Messages. This task involved factoring out a generic search view from the existing Messages search plugin and making it able to be used anywhere on the Meetup site. As a result, this generic search tool will also be able to replace a bunch of places where we have been using jQuery UI Autocomplete.
Usability Testing
After finishing the first version of the project, we ran it through usability testing to see what we could improve. Interestingly, we found that some organizers were confused about the permanence of their actions on the page. To make the actions more clear, we decided that it would be a good idea to pivot from our initial design. Instead of updating a member’s attendance in our database on click of a member’s corresponding checkbox, it would be better to include an explicit “Save” button in the nav bar. This way, if organizers were just curious to see what the attendance tool was, they could poke around without the fear of inadvertently changing their Meetup’s attendance. Additionally, we saw that some organizers did not understand what the magnifying glass search icon meant. To address this problem, we moved the search bar out of the nav bar and, instead, placed it right above the attendance count. We also added “Mark All” and “Unmark All” buttons to make taking attendance easier for organizers of larger groups. Some additional features that are currently in the works for version 2 are ways to mark members as “no-shows” and ways to mark members’ payment statuses.
The Final Product
Overall, working on this intern project was great; it was both fun and challenging, and we have definitely learned a lot from it. Many thanks to everyone who helped us along the way, and we hope that Meetup organizers will enjoy this new feature!
Interested in interning at Meetup? Contact recruitment at jobs@meetup.com
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