Hi Jaxel, recurring events are a great addition and I’ve been testing the function for the last few hours and talking on the phone with a couple of my users who are regular event organisers whilst they have been looking at the user interface, which has given me some good ‘first time user’ feedback on this event/calendar system.
Overall they like me, are very impressed with the system, but we have come up with a few suggestions that could make it easier for admins and users alike:
1 – Could you move the ‘Recur This Event Every:’ option to under Start/End Times, it seems more logical there and a bit lost where it is?
2 – Could you move the ‘Recurrence Cutoff’ option from the adminCP to the user interface and out on the same line as ‘Recur This Event Every:’?
The logic behind this is that loads of events occur every week all year, whilst others occur, for example, just during the summer (4, 5 or 6 months), so it would be better as a user rather than admin option. Both of my event organisers were confused as to how many entries they would be making when selecting ‘Recur This Event Every:’, without being able to input this themselves.
3 – Also with ‘Recurrence Cutoff’, instead of the option of ‘X number of months’ make it ‘X number of weeks’ plus set a max of 52 weeks (including the one inputted)?
The logic for this is some events will occur for just 6 weeks, which doesn’t fit in to recurring for 1 or 2 months, whereas an event over 12 months can just be recurred for 52 weeks.
4 – We think the option to recur per ‘X DAYS’ could cause confusion with a ‘Ranged Event’, which you can add anyway, as for example, Start date 1/1/11 – end date 6/1/11 (7 days) and it is listed in the calendar for 7 days.
Whereas we can see people adding an event for 1/1/11, selecting 7 days – result it’s listed every week, whereas they expected every day for 7 days. Also, I’ve never had any events I am aware of added that recur every 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 days, they are normally (99% of the time) daily*, weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
* Sometimes 5 or 6 days out of the week over a period of months, which neither ‘ranged’ or any of the current options of ‘recurring’ actually covers – the only why that this could be covered is by an option of selecting days by tick-boxes for a ranged event, e.g. booked from 1/1/11 to 31/1/11 tick boxes for every day of the week that it actually occurs on – not that I am suggesting that be added, for fear of you wanting to kill me.
5 – Monthly recurring events from experience normally occur on a set day rather than date per month, for example the first Wednesday of the month, rather than the 5th of every month, as this option is currently set-up. Is it easy to change this? Otherwise I think it would be better to leave this option out to avoid confusion.
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On reflection, if the recurs ‘X days’ options is deleted, recurs monthly can be changed to a set day instead of date, then in the add event interface, for user ease, it could appear as:
Start/End Dates & Times from [……………..............………..] till [……….........…………….……..]
Repeat this event every: [ ] week, [ ] fortnight or [ ] month for the next [… max 52…] weeks
- where [ ] are just tick boxes for week, fortnight or month, and this would cover 99% of events, accept those occurring on set days (Mon-Fri) per week over a longer period as mentioned above, whilst also making it very user friendly.
