CiviEvent Usability

At the Developer camps on the 28th and 29th of April, 2009 (ie last week) one of the major tracks for all the breakout sessions was usability. Which is a major theme of the 2.3 version upgrade. In two of the groups I participated in we talked about the usability of the CiviEvent module from a an administrators perspective. One frustration that we decided need addressed was the 5 step wizard to create an event. The items we discussed were the ridigity of the event creation wizard, adding simple events shortcuts and event templates. The Event creation wizard gives the impression that you have to go through all 5 steps to create and event even if you only need the first one or two steps (basic event description & location). In order to speed up the process of creating simple events we proposed creating shortcuts for 3 different common event types. Finally we discussed possibility of top level administrators being able to create master templates that fill in many of the fields (say you have a standard price structure and times but the locations can vary) and allow users to simply change the necessary fields. Event Creation Wizard Concerning the CiviEvent creation wizard four ideas were floated

• Accordion style screen with one field group for each of the different tabs in the current wizard ala the current mock-up for the contact edit screen
• "Clickable Steps" where one can click on the steps at the top of the Event creation screen, this solution will likely mean moving the save event button to the top of the screen in order to make it clear that you need to click save in order to save the entire event
• Create Now button, have a create event now button available at each step, likely to the left of the current continue button, also likely change the wording on the continue button to next step (or it occurs to me the something that reflects what the next step is, ie. for the first screen the button could say add location)
• The status Quo, we like it the way it is. Leave it alone! :)
The consensus of the group was the accordion style. Also, there was talk of rolling the accordion out to the contribution page creation wizard (which stands at 9 steps currently) This was the consensus of 10-15 developers. We need your input! Please comment below and give us an idea of what you think.

Simple Events Shortcuts In order to facilitate the creation of events we came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to add shortcuts into the upcoming drop-down list of shorcuts (version 2.3 feature) to create any of 3 separate simple events. We came up with three general simple events for users/admin to create using a shortcut.

• Paid events, simply the title/descriptions, date, location and fees fields
• Free events, same as paid but no fee fields
• Webinars, title/description, date, link to webinar

Having simple events raises the possibility of adding a permission to the ACL to give a non-admin user roles permission to add events, i.e. allow members to create events to organize other members (ala meet-ups, rallys, affinity groups, birds of a feather, etc...). There clearly will be a tension there around whether non-admins can create paid events. Event Templates Also raised was the possibility of creating event templates where by a top level administrator can create a template for an event that has particular parameters filled in (say you have the same price structure for all you events) and users can fill in the remaining fields. That issue was not resolved in the groups I participated in, though I know there were a couple breakouts that dug deeper into the topic and other attendees may have some input here. :) This is also fleshed out on the CiviEvents usability wiki page under Master Events