Event Feedback

[AbhiAgarwal]

This is fresh in my mind, and so I'll report some of them here. 97 people came to the event. 67/97 people checkin so roughly 70% of the people checkin! My person aim was 70% so that's excellent.

Some rough numbers on the issues that occurred:

• 4/67 people didn't want to use their facebook
• 5/67 people didn't remember their password
• 2/67 people had issues where they had to verify their identities on Facebook

The beginning issue missed out about 12 people because the DNS was still propagating, which was a bummer. This caused the site to go off and on - which was an issue! We told some people to skip the checkin because of this issue as the queue kept building up, and we couldn't wait for it to fix. Some of these people managed to login later though - when we made the announcement!

[grungerabbit]

Another: some people don't have FB, full stop. Maybe we could have a simple email login for these cases? with FB as priority?

I tested both the t@NYU laptop login and the phone login. The process was pretty smooth, kudos to everyone!

[AbhiAgarwal]

@grungerabbit I think there were 2 people who didn't have Facebook accounts at most. I think adding an alternative option would steer most people to using that particular option. That's the danger I think that could cause - most people would rather use their emails if they had the option to do so. I'm not too sure why, but it seems like this would be the case to me. Do you think you agree?

If you do agree - maybe it should be a separate form that we can switch over to if they are too unwilling to login with their Facebook. The two cases were: The CEO of One Month (Guest), and some other person who didn't want their email to be taken (I believe)

Them having their emails wouldn't actually help us get a lot of information from them. It would give us their email as an extra (we have names from when they RSVP on Facebook).

Loved the process though - was very smooth when it wasn't breaking (because of DNS).

[ethanresnick]

@grungerabbit See my comment here re some people not having facebook at all. Basically, I think that that could become an issue down the road, which we should keep in mind. But, right now, I think we should stick with facebook only because a) only ~2% of users not being able to check in isn't worth loosing sleep over but also b) there's a downside to supporting other sign in strategies too.

That downside is: 1) it's another thing for us to implement and design that we don't really have the bandwidth for; 2) it makes the ui more complicated; and 3) if facebook account holders used the non-facebook alternative, we'd lose good data on them (i.e. gender) and we'd have to do more work to manage data integrity (e.g. figure out how to merge multiple email addresses that belong to the same person).

[ethanresnick]

@AbhiAgarwal Thanks for these notes! It's good to know that we're already up from a 50% conversion rate to 70%. My goal is at least 90%, though, so still a ways to go. Hopefully we can get @irisyuan's ux suggestion coded up soon, as that'll give us the next big leap.

Can you elaborate on a couple things, though?

4/67 people didn't want to use their facebook

Did these people not want to sign in with facebook on the public computer, or did they not want to sign in with facebook at all (i.e. even on their own device)? If the latter, what did you tell them? Did it change their mind?

2/67 people had issues where they had to verify their identities on Facebook

What does this mean?

[AbhiAgarwal]

• 4/67 people didn't want to use their Facebook

For one individual Freia convinced them that we're doing a free event and giving people free food - so they did it. But for the rest they were kind of opposed. I get why the CEO of One Month would not want to do it - they maybe don't want to expose their private email? I let them through anyways.

One guy didn't have Platform enabled - which meant he couldn't use Login wIth Facebook anywhere. Basically disabling the use of his Facebook information outside of Facebook. He didn't want to enable it.

We told the other 2 to sign in with their devices if they were more comfortable, but I can't say if they did.

• 2/67 people had issues where they had to verify their identities on Facebook

Sometimes if you login with Facebook somewhere else or on another computer it asks you to verify your identity to see if it isn't someone hacking into your computer. The account either gets Temporarily Locked where you need to answer questions about your friends or an individual needs an ID to unlock it.

https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/?id=183190208381429, https://www.facebook.com/help/228372557180280

[ethanresnick]

@AbhiAgarwal Ok, thanks! Those clarifications help a lot. As far as action items from them go... I think we're not going to be able to do much about the small % of people that have Platform disabled, and we don't have to worry about the speaker not wanting to give us his private email. So, really, we just need to add a note to whatever procedures we put together for event leads saying that, if the person is asked to verify their identity, just tell them not to worry about it and to check in on their own device.

[AbhiAgarwal]

@ethanresnick agreed! that's a good case for that. Just let him do it on his/her own device if that thing occurs. If they are an NYU student it becomes unlikely because they are signing in from the same network (our events will mostly be at NYU).

[AbhiAgarwal]

Adding here for feedback from HackDays. We did not get people to checkin at the beginning of events, but when they all sat down we all got them to checkin through the website. This worked really well! We got about a 81% attendees who checked in. Also because I think Max (b/c he was speaking), and a couple other e-board members didn't checkin to the event.

This system worked really well for us as we didn't have to stop and form a queue at the beginning.