MyPunchblog

I’m very happy to announce a brand-new release of MyPunchbowl.com. More details later. For now, here’s the press release that is going out at midnight tonight:

MyPunchbowl.com adds new features for Halloween party planning, announces “Party Animal” Facebook application
 Enhanced version of MyPunchbowl.com ready for Halloween party planning, Facebook app “Party Animal” offers a fun new way to tell your friends how they act at a party 

Natick, Mass. (PRWeb) September 17, 2007 – Punchbowl Software today released a new version of its party planning software MyPunchbowl.com, adding to its leadership position as the most sophisticated event and party planning site on the web. MyPunchbowl.com is located at http://www.mypunchbowl.com  

With its unique workflow interface, MyPunchbowl.com is the perfect site for Halloween party planning. The new “Party Checklist” feature offers an innovative way to organize everything for a Halloween party. Party Checklist includes “Potluck,” a quick and simple way to ask your friends to bring something from the list to the party. The Party Checklist feature provides the ability for users to create their own categories, re-order checklist items, and indicate the most important items to track. Together, these features offer unprecedented party planning functionality for MyPunchbowl.com users. 

Today Punchbowl Software also announced a new application developed specifically for the Facebook platform. The new application “Party Animal” offers a fun new way to tell your friends how they act at a party. Facebook users can vote for their friends, choosing between personalities such as “Drunken Pig” and “Lone Wolf.” Facebook users can also unlock bonus animals by creating a MyPunchbowl.com account. Bonus animals include celebrity personalities such as “Paris Hilton” and “Snoop Dogg” and creative party animals such as a “Social Butterfly” and “Party Pooper.”  Facebook users are raving about Punchbowl Software’s Party Animal. “My friends all love the new Party Animal Facebook app,” said Molly Clark-Barol, a Senior at Yale University, “it’s fun to see how my friends think I act at a party, and I even got an idea for my Halloween costume.” 

MyPunchbowl.com has also been updated with many features that are perfect for Halloween party planning. Additional new features on MyPunchbowl.com include:

• 25+ Halloween party planning templates: themes include Halloween party templates appropriate for adult and kids Halloween parties
• Penelope Plans: Resident party planning blogger Penelope writes on Halloween themes, ideas, and offers Halloween party planning advice
• New guest view: A new tabbed view provides guests with the ability to quickly indicate if they are bringing friends to the event, as well as what they will bring from the Potluck list.
• Unlimited Co-hosts: MyPunchbowl users can invite a friend to help them host the party. MyPunchbowl events can have unlimited co-hosts.
• Duplicate a party: With a single click, any event can be copied, which provides a quick and easy way to start your next party
• Notifications: Hosts and guests can now choose to receive notifications when any activity takes place on the party message boards
• On-screen Help: MyPunchbowl now includes on screen guides to help users learn the features of the site
• Bounced email notification: Hosts now receive notification if their guest’s email address is incorrect

In addition, Punchbowl Software has selected Engine Yard as its new web hosting provider, to better handle the popularity of MyPunchbowl.com and to improve overall performance. “We’re excited to help MyPunchbowl.com grow,” said Tom Mornini of Engine Yard, “our dedicated cluster technology can scale to meet their needs.” 

MyPunchbowl offers party planning tools to help hosts look good. It’s the perfect site for planning holidays, life milestone events, as well as adult and kids birthday parties. This latest release provides new features and functionality just in time for Halloween. “We’re a small and nimble company,” said Matt Douglas, Founder of Punchbowl Software, “we’re excited that we can offer great new features right in time for Halloween party planning.”

To sign up for a free MyPunchbowl account, visit http://www.mypunchbowl.com

This morning I came across an interesting post from the founder of Fog Creek Software, Joel Spolsky. Joel wrote about his experience dealing with a web design firm. Writing about his new web design Joel wrote, “We’ve been tweaking it and polishing it and changing things carefully, and the firm we hired to design it has been taking us step-by-step through information architecture, site maps, wireframes, initial designs, and several rounds of design. All with a carefully-designed process to get our buy-in at every step along the way. And so far every step I thought the design was converging and we’d get a nice web design out of it. And then I came back after a week on the road, took one look at it, and thought, oh crap. We can’t go public with that.”

I read this post and chuckled. This exact phenomenon has happened to me numerous times as I’ve developed software user interfaces and marketing campaigns. It’s frustrating for the people you work with. In many cases, just like Joel, people around me have gotten my buy-in all along the way. And then bam! I take a fresh look at it and no longer like it.

So why does this happen? I think there are a bunch of factors that lead to this kind of a moment. Here are a few:

1) We’ve all lost sight of the “main” thing: In my opinion, a good design clearly points the user to the main purpose of the page. In the times where I’ve had the “just not right” feeling, I look at the design and think to myself “I don’t see the main point of this page.” That’s a clear sign.

2) It doesn’t feel right: The reality is that we all have our own sense of what “feels right.” If it doesn’t feel right to you, then you just have to fix it.  Joshua Porter wrote today that “people make sense to themselves.” I agree. And people know for themselves what looks good and feels right. When you’re the final decision maker (like Joel), it’s critical that you know when to say “this doesn’t look right.” The key is choosing when and how to say that, and to not do it too frequently (unless you want to really piss off the designers and engineers).

3) It doesn’t look as good as Blahblah.com: I don’t care what your process of design is, but if at the end of the day you look at your design and then you look at someone else’s design and you feel inferior, then you have to go fix it. I’ve been in this situation many times. We *thought* we were on the right path, but the final product simply didn’t look as good as something else we had seen. The key to communication with designers is to clearly explain why you think Blahblah.com is better — and be as specific as possible. The better you can articulate the differences, the more likely they are to work with you to fix the design.

I applaud Joel for recognizing that sometimes you have to stop the presses and revisit your design. Even if you are “on board” all of the way through the process, you have to be truly happy and proud of the final product. After all, users don’t have the insight to see the process along the way. They only see the final product. And it better be great if you want to keep them as users.

My co-founder (Sean) and I spent lots of time designing MyPunchbowl.com well before we hired any software engineers. It’s sometimes amusing to think about how much time we spent in front of the whiteboard– but we believe that products should be designed first, then implemented. Of course there is a balance. You can’t design every detail about a feature before you begin implementation. Many times the nuances about a particular feature only are clear when you have a chance to actually use it. So how do you guide your decision-making as you are tweaking a feature?

For us, we developed an internal mantra that helps guide our decision-making. It’s a mantra that I remind the team of often. It’s an important guiding principle. Our mantra is simply this: Help the host look good.

This may seem like an easy mantra to implement, but it’s not. As we make design decisions, we constantly have to make tradeoffs between what is better for guests and what is better for hosts. Using this mantra, these decisions become easier. Here’s an example: our RSVP options are all based on helping the host look good. There are other ways to implement these RSVP features that might be better for guests, but we believe that our role at MyPunchbowl.com is to help hosts look good. This mantra makes hard design decisions much easier.

It’s great when we get validation from real customers. Chris from Idaho recently wrote to us: “We used MyPunchbowl for our first family reunion in 20+ years and everyone, I mean everyone, was totally satisfied with the MyPunchbowl invitation. Our reunion was in Seattle (and I’m in Idaho) and because of your site/service it made me look so GOOD! Thanks for making it so Fabulous! Chris from Middleton Idaho.”

I’m convinced that all great products have mantras.

What’s your product’s mantra?

A user named Karlie (her email indicates she is from the Seattle area) just sent us an email that I thought was worth sharing.

Karlie wrote: “Do invitees need to create an account in order to see the save the date announcements?”

Here’s the email response I sent her: “Karlie: Thanks for writing. No, invitees do not need to create an account in order to see the save the date. Of course, they can choose to if they want to (some guests like to create an account because MyPunchbowl allows you to see which parties that you are invited to as well as the ones you are hosting). Hope that helps. Thanks for using MyPunchbowl.com.”

So there you have it– a simple but important point. Your guests are not required to create an account, but they can if they want to.

We love hearing from users. Keep your great feedback coming. Email us at support@punchbowlsoftware.com

A few users have written to us over the last couple of months asking for a neat new feature on MyPunchbowl.com.

Cassy wrote: “I am using mypunchbowl for our wedding RSVPs. I thought it would be nice to be able to add a few names of people who don’t have emails and manually rsvp for them. Right now I have two lists: the mypunchbowl one and an excel document with only ten people who don’t have email. Maybe theres already a way to do this but I just haven’t figured it out yet. But, I just thought that would be a cool feature.”

Well Cassy– we agree. That’s why we recently added a neat new feature called “Add Guest” to the Manage Guests page. Here’s how it works: if you have a guest that you would like to add to your guest list but you don’t have their email address, simply click the green plus (+) button on the Manage Guests page (note: you will need to send out invites to some people before you see this button). Here’s what it looks like:

Once you click that button, you can add guests to the guest list (without their email address).

Now you can edit that guests RSVP response. You can even indicate how many friends they are bringing.

We love this feature because it provides the host a way to track their entire guest list, regardless of whether they have the guest’s email address.

Cassy– this one’s for you. Enjoy planning.

Start your next party at MyPunchbowl.com

One of things that we try to do at MyPunchbowl.com is to build our software so that we can improve the product quickly. Templates and themes is a great example.

When we built the “Pick a Theme” page, we carefully made sure to build a robust back-end system so that we could create more templates quickly. This means that without any programming or additional software development, we can create new templates and push them “live” to the site very fast. Because of this technology, we’re literally adding dozens of templates every week.

The part about this that is really rewarding is that users have been emailing us template ideas, and we’re able to respond very quickly. Brian emailed us early this week asking for a “Hockey” template. Here’s what we made for him (within a few hours):

What templates or themes do you want? Go to MyPunchbowl.com and click on the “Feedback” link (bottom of page) to let us know. We’ll get it made quickly!

We’ve gotten many requests from users since we launched MyPunchbowl.com. We’ve been trying to implement these requests as fast as possible. I’m happy to report that we’ve been able to address many of these issues in our most recent release– which is now available.

Before I list out some of the improvements, I wanted to mention that as part of this new release, MyPunchbowl introduces a new party planning blog named “Penelope Plans.” Written by an in-house party planning expert, Penelope offers party advice, tips, and planning ideas in a fun and engaging format. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

There are close to 100 improvements and enhancements in this release. Here are some of the key highlights:

• 50+ new templates: themes include summer drinks, girls night out, pool party and more
• Add to Calendar: hosts and guests can easily add the event date to their iCal, Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, or Outlook calendar
• Export to .csv: Hosts can quickly export the entire guest list to .csv allowing them to do things such as create name badges for events
• RSVP Reminders: For guests who are not ready to RSVP, they can set auto-reminders. MyPunchbowl will email the guest a reminder based on the date the guest chooses
• Guests can now forward an invitation to a friend using the “Forward to a Friend” feature
• Hosts can now add a name to the guest list without sending an invitation. Useful for managing a complete guest list even if you don’t have a guests email address
• Auto-reminders: hosts who create a Save-the-date will be reminded to create invitations two weeks before the event.
• Total guest count: Hosts can view the total invited for both Save-the-Date and Invitations
• Hosts can now sort the manage guests list, providing new ways to look at the data
• Personal Messages: hosts can review personal messages after the invitation is sent
• Substantially faster email sending process to accommodate for larger guest list

I’d like to invite you to use the product for a real event or party and let us know what you think. To send us feedback (that our whole team will read!) simply click on the “Feedback” link at the bottom of any page.

Enjoy our new release…and thanks for using MyPunchbowl.com.

This morning, we had a few users write and let us know that they mistakenly received a reminder for a party that has already past. Here’s the good news and the not so good news…

Good news: We’re adding great features to MyPunchbowl based on users’ requests. One of them is a great new reminder feature. I’ll be blogging about the details of all of the features of this new release soon.

Not so good news: For some parties in the past, we mistakenly sent out a reminder message. This is completely our fault, and you should ignore the reminder message. Basically what happened is that an automated script ran, and some parties weren’t excluded. This mistake happened only once — and only to some of our users.

This is compeltely unacceptable  and we’re very sorry that this happened. We take privacy and sending you emails very seriously– we don’t like getting extra emails and know that you don’t either. Please accept our apologies- it won’t happen again.

As users of MyPunchbowl.com know, when you receive an invitation to an event as a guest, you can choose to indicate that you are bringing friends with you. The way you do this is by clicking on the text box that says “No just me.” Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like in guest view:

Many users have written to us to let us know that they think the feature is unclear. Garrett recently wrote, “That’s really unintuitive, and none of my guests have figured that out.”

Garrett and others: we agree. It’s not intuitive and we are working on a better implementation. It’s coming soon.

The problem with feature-rich software is that sometimes when you add a new feature (like this one) it’s hard to find an elegant way to integrate it with the existing features. We have new ideas about how to implement this particular feature, and we think it will be much more intuitive than it is now. Stay tuned.

thought you would enjoy reading the “official” press release about our great new functionality…

MyPunchbowl releases breakthrough “Pick-a-Date” functionality, adds to its leadership position

“Pick-a-Date” includes a real-time algorithm to drive group consensus, functionality unrivaled in event and party planning web-based software 

Natick, Mass. (PRWeb) May 22, 2007 – MyPunchbowl.com today released breakthrough “Pick-a-Date” functionality, adding to its leadership position as the most sophisticated event and party planning site on the web. MyPunchbowl.com is located at http://www.mypunchbowl.com  

MyPunchbowl helps consumers celebrate, and is the perfect product for planning holidays, life milestone events, as well as adult and kids birthday parties. Pick-a-Date offers unrivaled functionality, making MyPunchbowl ideal for coordinating summer parties and barbeques. “Now I can make sure the most important people are at my Fourth of July party,” said Nora Brennan, a new MyPunchbowl user, “MyPunchbowl’s Pick-a-Date is so easy to use and incredibly helpful.” 

MyPunchbowl is the first event and party planning website to offer a real-time algorithm which drives group consensus and automates date selection for the host. Unlike current methods which require the host to manually settle on a date from a group’s overall responses, MyPunchbowl allows the host to indicate which guests are the most important (VIPs) and offers a unique method to drive group consensus. When a guest responds, MyPunchbowl Pick-a-Date places each guest response under one date option based on their availability. As more guests respond, the software groups guests together in real-time to form consensus. Group dynamics then influence individual behavior as future guests choose a date to align with the majority. This unique method helps quickly drive group consensus and automates date selection for the host. 

The MyPunchbowl Pick-a-Date functionality culminates months of research and development and extensive customer input. “We believe Pick-a-Date offers breakthrough functionality for event and party planning,” said Matt Douglas, Founder, Punchbowl Software, “this advances MyPunchbowl.com as the most user-friendly and sophisticated event and party planning software on the web.”   Key MyPunchbowl Pick-a-Date features include:

• Real-time adjustment of the best date based on guest availability
• Current consensus is indicated for all guests, to drive consensus to a specific date
• An unlimited number of potential dates and times
• A message board to quickly communicate with potential guests
• Ability to easily create a Save the Date or Invitation using the consensus date

MyPunchbowl Pick-a-Date is available to MyPunchbowl users. To sign up for a free MyPunchbowl account, visit http://www.mypunchbowl.com