Now that the Rails 3 upgrade is behind us we can get back to iterating upon our user experience and feature set. There is still much that can be done to improve it and the most obvious case of this was probably the ticket types dialog.

Ticket descriptions

We noticed that a lot of people where cramming quite a bit information into the ticket name so we added a ticket description field.

The ticket description is the perfect place to put any qualifiers or clarifications that you may have regarding the ticket. Things like bonuses you get from buying this ticket or special requirements you may need.

The infamous Qty column

Other than PayPal, our biggest topic for support questions has been the ticket type dialog. There was a lot confusion as to what the Qty column was referring to. We had intended for it to indicate the number of tickets available for sale, but many people interpreted this as the number of tickets available per order. So some event hosts put a 1 or a 2 here and then became confused when their event sold out after only one sale.

Well, no more! We’ve renamed it “# to Sell” which is much clearer and also added a “# Sold” column as well.

Ticket statuses

Stopping sales on a particular ticket type used to be more difficult than it should have. One had to reduce the Qty field to below the amount already sold which, by the way, was also not so easy to find out. We’ve cleaned this up nicely by adding a status which can take one of three values:

Selling This is the default and behaves as you would expect. Tickets will be available for sale until the # to Sell equals # Sold.

Sold Out When a ticket type is marked as “Sold Out” we cut off sales and display it identically to actually sold out types on the public event page, regardless of how many tickets are remaining. This is good for hiding early bird tickets after the deadline has passed.

Hidden Hidden cuts off sales and completely hides the ticket type from the public event page. This is useful if you need to keep some of the ticket types for special use such as sponsorships or if you have made a price change that you do not want to be publicly visible.

Custom fields

Users had frequently asked us whether it was possible to create custom fields to collect additional attendee data even though we have supported this feature for quite some time. We now have a prominent link right on the ticket types dialog to make it easier for users to discover this feature.

And so much more…

We also fixed a myriad of small issues such as disabled dropdowns not looking disabled (they do now!) and the Guestlist fee dropdown being hard to understand (so hard in fact that we were frequently confused ourselves).

These are all minor changes but we feel it is important to address small points of confusion if you want to build a really solid user experience.