The Spotlight : Usability

Selling out is a beautiful thing

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:22:00 GMT

The PEO Labs series brings you information or advice on items that are geared towards users who can take high-level concepts or sample code and run with them. Please note that many of the things discussed are not supported. That doesn't mean that an item is a warranty-voider; it just means that the Support Analysts can't walk you through it or troubleshoot it if it breaks.

In Patron Edge Online 3.3.3, we started work on a feature that will allow you to continue to display sold out events on your website rather than having them get removed. This is a great feature in a couple of ways. First, the marketing folks will love it because patrons who visit your site can see how popular your events are and won't wait until last minute to make a purchase. A press release that says your last ballet performance sold out on the first day of sale is a great boost to your reputation. From a customer service perspective, it's also a win because people who visit your website can see that the event they want is already sold out instead of calling the box office to see if it has gone on sale or if there are still tickets available.

The reason this is a PEO Labs post is because the feature requires the help of a DBA to implement so it isn't something that a support analyst will take you through. But with a tech person and 15 minutes of free time and you can get this up and running. Here's how:

Set up Patron Edge

Go to Administration, User Setup, User Groups
Edit the Internet user group and set Update Events Active Data Table to Yes. If you don't see this option, just use the Design toolbar to turn on the field.

Create the SQL job

In Enterprise Manager or SQL Management Studio, create a SQL job to run against the PE database with the following command: exec CalcEventsActiveDataView. This is the part where you want the tech person involved. Set it to run on a schedule as frequent as your PE/PEO sync runs. By default a partial sync runs every hour, but you may want to set this more or less frequently; your mileage may vary on how long a sync takes.

Add the sales point to Patron Edge Online

Go to Administration, System Setup, Sales Points
Create a new entry that uses the number of the Internet sales point. The description can be anything you want; I would set it to the same description as you have in PE for clarity's sake.

Configure Site Settings

Here is where all of the business logic comes in. Your tech person can do the configuration, but the box office manager and marketing manager need to make some business decisions.

Set Display sold out events to 1 (leave at 0 to remove the event from the site altogether when it is sold out).
Set Display sold out shows to 1 (leave at 0 to remove the show altogether when all of its events are sold out).
Set an expression for Sold-out behavior, using one of these examples:

Option	Value	Explanation
<empty string>		Events will never be defined as "Sold Out"
Numeric value	5	Event is Sold Out once number of empty seats = 5
Percentage	10%	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10%
Min(Value, Percentage)	Min(5,10%)	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10% number of empty seats = 5, whichever is lower
Max(Value, Percentage)	Max(5,10%)	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10% number of empty seats = 5, whichever is higher

And with that, I bid you good weekend. Now take this stuff, run with it, and come back to leave comments about how it's working for you.

Save time on the Administration site with Favorites

Nicholai Burton — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:10:00 GMT

Sorry for not posting anything last week; I'll give you two great posts this week to make up for it!

Patron Edge Online version 3.3.3 introduced a completely new, redesigned Administration site to organize things better and make running the site easier. One of the best new features is Favorites. You can save all of the site pieces you frequently hit to your Favorites and access them from the Home tab with one click. The best part is that it's very intuitive. Here's how to create your first Favorite:

1. On the Administration site, browse to Content, Events, Shows
2. Now click the blue star icon in the upper left part of the screen
3. When prompted, enter a name for your favorite or just leave the caption as is, and click OK
4. Lather, rinse, and repeat, until you have all your most frequently used items favorited

When you log into the Administration site you start on the Home tab. Now you can just click Favorites and choose the place you want to go, eliminating the distraction of all entries that aren't relevant to your needs. A site administrator would choose items like Site Settings, Start Sync, Esro Logs and Check Connection as Favorites. For a designer or content creator, Favorites might be Shows, Designs for Tickets, and Interfaces.

What Administration features do you use most? Has the Favorites feature helped you save time?

Validate form fields in Patron Edge Online

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:10:00 GMT

Patron Edge Online can be a double-edged sword when it comes to data entry. A user has the ability to enter his own address and phone information so that you don't have to try to track it down elsewhere later on, but when you don't enforce any kind of formatting standard, searching or reporting on it in the system can become a pain. Luckily PEO has a built-in feature that allows you to validate form fields using something called a regular expression. If that phrase means nothing to you, don't worry. We have a regular expression builder that will walk you through it. If you are familiar with JavaScript regular expressions, you can write them manually and bypass the builder tool.

Regular expressions are a great way to test for valid phone and email formatting, so be sure to take a few minutes this week and set up a few. To illustrate how to use the builder, here is an example that forces Email to have an @ symbol and at least one period.

Go to Administration, System Setup, User-Fields Rules
Edit the row for Email
Click the regular expression builder button beside Regular Exp 1
From the Begins with drop-down list, select 'any char' that occurs 'once or many'
In the Followed By section, select 'the char', enter the @ symbol, and select occurs 'once'. Then click Add
Change Followed By to 'any char' that occurs 'once or many' and click Add
Change Followed By again to 'the char', enter a period and select occurs 'once'. Click Add again
In the Ends With section, select 'any char' occurs 'once or many'
To test, enter various combinations of values in the Validate field and click Validate. An alert box will tell if the values pass the rule or not.
When finished, click OK.

If you are familiar with creating regular expressions, you can type directly into the Regular Exp 1 field and skip the builder. In the above example, you can type the expression ^.+@.+\..+$ directly into the field. Advanced users note: the regular expression field does not support the Replace or Split methods, only the Test method.

What other regular expressions are you using to keep your data in a nice, clean format? Leave a note in the comments.

Five ways to cut transaction time

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:54:00 GMT

On a busy day, every second counts when making a sale. Long lines make patrons impatient and a bad enough waiting experience can even be enough to prevent someone from coming back to visit you. Lines at theme parks are so bad nowadays, my wife and I don't even bother anymore. With that in mind, here are five tips that can help you cut mouse clicks and seconds from every transaction:

Remember price types when buying several events at once
Patron Edge has a Company setting called Ignore Price Type Reordering. Set this to No, and what will happen is that when you choose a price type and tickets for the first event in a transaction, it will remember that price type for all subsequent events in the sale (if it's available). This should save at least a couple of clicks per transaction if you have a lot of patrons who buy several events at once
Use the touch screen
If you are a general admission organization, use the touch screen for sales. You can remove at least 3 mouse clicks per transaction by using the GA sales screen instead of the standard screen.
Use shortcut keys
If you are a reserved seating or mixed organization, the GA screen doesn't do you any good. But the standard sales screen in Patron Edge has a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Check out our User Guides page for a cheat sheet you can post next to the cashiers' monitors, called the Sales Keyboard Shortcut Reference Sheet.
Trim payment method options
In the payment screen, there are a lot of payment methods available by default. It's likely that you will never find yourself using several of these. To declutter the screen, go to Administration, User Setup, Profiles and turn off unused pay methods. You can see Knowledgebase solution BB198026 for detailed steps if you are unfamiliar with editing profiles.
Create a cash-only line
For popular events and big on-sales, having a line dedicated to cash transactions can help keep lines short. If it's advertised well enough, it may even prompt patrons to come visit with cash in hand, sparing them long lines and saving you money on credit card fees. While you're at it, configure your cash drawers to pop before receipts print; the cashier will have the chance to make change while a receipt prints and can then hand both change and receipt to the patron at once, shaving precious seconds from a transaction.

I'm sure you've come up with other tips and techniques to minimize wait time. What has worked best for your organization? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Firefox 3 has been released!

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:35:00 GMT

Firefox, the greatest of the modern browsers, released version 3 of their product just about four hours ago and it has already been downloaded nearly 3 million (million!) times. It's more secure, prettier, faster and smarter than anything else out there (yes, even you Safari). I encourage all of you to download and use it exclusively for a better browsing experience. If you need to access your Patron Edge Online Administration Site, you can install the excellent IETab extension and do it all in one browser. With this extension I don't think I've purposely launched Internet Explorer in two or three years, and haven't had run-ins with malware of any kind. And now it even integrates with web apps. For example, I can click a mailto link and it will launch my Gmail composer.

For those who have done a fair amount of PEO design work and had to do any special browser-specific tweaks to make things look the way you want, make sure to test your site in this newest version to ensure that your patrons won't experience any display issues. The US and Canada together have almost hit the one million download mark, so you can be sure that your patrons are using it already.

What do your patrons think about your PEO site?

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:50:00 GMT

While thinking about ways to get people more involved with an organization's online presence, I realized that most websites give an opportunity to leave feedback about the website itself. The best way to improve usability is to talk with users, right? I’ve done this with ING Direct, Netflix and a handful of other sites to let them know about bad links or usability issues. Often I leave positive feedback, just to let an organization know that I appreciate a new feature or change to their site that has made my life easier.

So following that line of thought, I whipped this up one evening while watching reruns of Scrubs. It is a new page for Patron Edge Online that allows a person to enter her name, email (if desired) and thoughts about your site. Now that version 3.3.3 has been released, I also threw in an accompanying custom report that can be generated to allow your web marketer or webmaster to review feedback on demand.

You can view a screenshot of what the page looks like here. As always, play with it on a test interface first! This feature is pretty basic (and potentially very valuable) but keep in mind that it is not supported. To install:
1. Download this ZIP file and extract the contents
2. Add Feedback_Form.asp and insert_feedback.asp to your public\bbcustomizations folder
3. If you do not have the Custom Site Settings table yet (from earlier PEO Labs articles), run Create Custom Site Settings Table.sql against your PEO database
4. Run LeaveFeedback.sql against your PEO database to create the custom table that will hold the actual comments
5. Create a new screen called Feedback
6. Create a new screen part on the Feedback screen (INCLUDE is the type) that points to bbcustomizations\Feedback_Form.asp
7. Edit the feedbackheader CSS class so that it matches your site’s overall design

You can also import the Site Feedback Report into the Custom Reports section of the Administration Site, or review the feedback via the Custom Tables folder.

Are you currently using any method of capturing user feedback about your website? How has it affected your design or business processes? Leave a message in the comments.

Restrict delivery methods online

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:07:00 GMT

Here’s a quickie while I’m working on a few things:

Patron Edge Online 3.2.5 and higher gives us the ability to get granular with delivery methods. This will allow people who are buying tickets to the Romeo and Juliet matinée print them at home, but those who are coming to the nearly sold out Pink Martini show have to come pick their tickets up at Will Call. Here’s how:

On the Administration Site, go to Events, Shows and highlight a show
Click the email/PDF icon on the toolbar. If you hover, it will say “Choose available delivery methods”
Check or uncheck Mail and Print at Home as needed. Will Call is always an available delivery method.

How are you currently using this feature? Is it a security measure, a marketing tool to get people to the box office, or something else entirely? Leave a note in the comments.

Give your patrons interactive directions to your venue

Nicholai Burton — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The internet behemoth that is Google has given us a great tool to get people into your doors, literally. Google Maps is at a point now where there is no reason not to have an interactive map and driving directions to your venue. It’s also a very simple feature to implement using some basic PEO design concepts. Let’s walk through adding a map with driving directions to your site.

Get the code for the map

Go to http://maps.google.com, enter the address of your venue and perform a search. In the resulting map, click ‘Link to this page’. Click ‘Customize and preview embedded map’ and you’ll get this screen. Choose the desired map size and then copy all the HTML onto the clipboard.

Create a new Directions page on the PEO site

Go into Site Design, Screens and create a new screen called Directions. Due to sizing, I recommend using Template 2. After creating the screen, use the Screen Part Location Tool to create a new HTML:Free screen part. Click the button in the Text field to bring up the HTML editor. Now click the button to insert HTML and paste in the code you copied earlier. Click OK when finished.

Create a link to the Directions page

To access this page, link to it as you would any custom screen. If you aren’t sure how to create that link, just take a look at this post.

Throw some text on there with your contact information and any special notes (handicapped parking, etc) and you’ve got a simple, easy to use directions page for your patrons. Are you using any web mapping applications already for this or another purpose? Share your experiences in the comments.

Sorting a spreadsheet by color

Nicholai Burton — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:04:00 GMT

So I was given an internal cleanup project that had a spreadsheet of 500 items that needed to be reviewed and acted on. As I worked through the list over the course of a couple of weeks, I color-coded the items based on the next action to take (follow up, merge, close, etc). At the end of the project I wanted to sort the spreadsheet by color, only to discover that Excel can't do this! Well, being the curious sort I started exploring the option of doing it with a VBA macro. Using a combination of web searches and help files, I put this macro together:

Sub ColorSort()

Dim ColorValue
Dim LastRow
Dim LastColumn

LastRow = Cells.Find(What:="*", After:=[A1], SearchDirection:=xlPrevious).Row
LastColumn = Cells.Find(What:="*", After:=[A1], SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, SearchDirection:=xlPrevious).Column

For i = 2 To LastRow

ColorValue = Cells(i, LastColumn).Offset(0, -1).Interior.ColorIndex
Cells(i, LastColumn).Value = ColorValue

Next i

End Sub

You just need to create a column at the end of your worksheet and call it "Color" or something like that. Next, run the macro; it assigns a number based on the background color of the row. You can then sort the worksheet by the "Color" column, and voila!

While this isn't directly Patron Edge or Patron Edge Online related, it has become such a great tool for me I thought some of you might find it helpful as well. Maybe you've had an event get cancelled and you get a phone list through Marketing Mailing that someone is color-coding. Maybe you are using the Raiser's Edge export module and working with a spreadsheet it kicked out. Or maybe you're doing something completely non-work-related and you find a use for this. If this macro helps you save some time, leave a comment for others to see!

Using Google Analytics to get more out of PEO

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:17:00 GMT

Google has a powerful, free tool available, called Google Analytics, that will allow you to collect all kinds of aggregate data about your site's visitors. You can use this information to:

Track the geographic location of site visitors to plan where to spend your advertising dollars
Determine what page a visitor hits first on your site and how long he spends there
See what sites or search engines are referring patrons to you
Look for trends to see if parts of your site are confusing or cumbersome to visitors
Discover how many times a visitor comes to your site before making a purchase

I'm not a marketer or a webmaster, but I'm sure there are a hundred other uses you can come up with for this tool. There is a nice demo on their site here that walks you through what the tool can do and how it works. This probably leaves you with some questions. How much does it cost? How long will it take to implement? How do you actually make it happen?

How much does it cost?

According to the Google Analytics site, use of the service is free if you get less than five million (million!) pageviews per month.

How long will it take to get started?

Getting an account with Google Analytics takes a few minutes, and adding it into PEO only a little longer. I would plan for 30 minutes to an hour for the whole project, plus any time you spend playing with settings and setting up reports in your Google Analytics account.

How do I do it?

First, you need to sign up for an account. Once you sign up, you receive something called a Tracking Code. Hold on to this as we will need it again soon.
Download this file and place it in the bbCustomizations folder of your public site.
Edit line six of the file, replacing "UA-xxxx-x" with the Tracking Code you got in step one.
On the PEO Admin site, go into Site Design and edit all of the screens of the interface you are using. In the Include After field, enter bbCustomizations\GAnalytics.htm. This is the part that can take a little while, depending on how many screens you have.

And you're finished! That wasn't so difficult, was it? After you have this all set up in Patron Edge Online, you will definitely want to go back into your Google Analytics account and do some tweaking so that the data it captures for you is more accurate.

You have some opportunities to get really advanced with this if you'd like by tagging the URLs that you send out in your marketing campaigns. For example, tagging your email blasts with things like campaign information will help you determine which ones are most effective. My site is internal only, so I haven't been able to try tagging to verify it plays nicely with PEO, but let me know if you try it out and how well it works. How are you using analytical/statistical data to drive your mission? Leave a message in the comments.

Hiding Unused fields in Patron Edge

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:58:00 GMT

Hiding Unused fields in Patron Edge

One of the nice things about the Patron Edge Administration piece is that you can turn off things that don't apply to your organization. If you're a producing organization then you probably don't need the Promoter field when creating an event. If you are tax exempt you don't need the Tax Group fields. Turning off these fields takes a matter of seconds and gives you a much cleaner interface. Let's turn off a couple event fields as an example. Try this:

Go to Administration, Events, Events
Click the Design button on the toolbar
Locate Internet Default Price Type and set the Display field to No. This field has been deprecated anyway; might as well get it out of your way!

This concept can be applied all throughout Administration; just don't get too happy turning off fields you may need in the future! To take the next step, you can go to Administration, System Setup, Table Definitions, which controls just about every field everywhere so that you can turn off CRM Search Screen options you don't use for example.

Let your patrons know when something is wrong

Nicholai Burton — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:20:00 GMT

I see a lot of PEO sites out there that still use the canned error messages whenever something goes wrong. If I buy concert tickets for my wife's birthday and see an error that just says "L1029 - Credit Card Payment Transaction Failed" I will give up right there and either come back the next day, call the box office, or go to another website and buy her a different gift. People who have used PEO for a couple of years may think, "PCCharge must have frozen. I'll go restart it and everything will be fine". But keep in mind the patron has no idea what PCCharge or PEO are; they just know your organization.

Usability is key

Website usability is essential for driving online sales. And just as your site should be usable, so too should your error messages. When something goes wrong, you want a patron to understand two things to keep him from calling the box office (or abandoning the purchase altogether). He needs to know:

What happened - The patron needs to know if the error that occurred was a system error or his own fault. People will admit their mistakes a lot more easily when nobody is looking. Include the error code at the beginning or end of the message so that, in the event of a system error, you know what to do internally.
How to fix it - Tell the patron that the phone number field is filled out incorrectly or that the show just went off sale.

Some errors in PEO are not the patron's fault, but you can still put a message out telling him to contact the box office. This has a twofold advantage - it allows you to save the sale and alerts you that something is wrong with the site. Be sure to include a phone number in the message!

Let's do a quick example. Take the following error message:

L1020-Invalid Password

It gets the job done, but it's not really helpful. You could change it to something like:

Your password is invalid. Please try again. Remember that passwords are case sensitive.

If you have lost your password, enter your email address in the Login field and click Forgot Password to have it sent to you.
L1020

This message has several things going for it:

It tells the patron what went wrong without being accusatory
It offers clear steps to fix the problem
It contains the error code in case a support call is needed

Care to share your own error messages? Leave a note in the comments.