Refining Calls for Sessions and Host UX

The calls for sessions feature was welcomed by the groups using the platform and was immediately put to use. After some groups used it in real life with different event formats, they flagged a few areas of improvement.

Here’s a quick overview of the changes and improvements made to the Call for Sessions feature:

• Participants can now submit more than one proposal for the same call (pretty obvious, but escaped me in the initial version)
• Proposals now accept more information from the moment they are created, particularly if they are game proposals. Now the submitter can add cover image, content warnings, genre (which was previously not part of the sessions), etc. They all carry over automatically to the sessions, if the proposal is accepted
• The proposal that originates a session is now surfaced for Organizers and Hosts in the Session Management page, making it easier to refer to comments and answers to custom questions that may have been included in the initial submission

I’m sure there will be other improvements needed as people continue to play around with the feature, but I can already see in my own use case (managing the roster of games and GMs for BIRCON) that the flow works well.

With that in the bag, I moved on to reorganizing the host-facing pages of the Dashboard. Hosts are special kinds of users who have some access and management privileges over their own sessions, but do not have access to the fully-fledged “Organizer” area of the Dashboard. This little ambiguity led me to some information architecture decisions during the early days of the development that started to strain at the seams. It was time to apply some proper elbow patches (the nice suede ones) to the Dashboard > Hosting pages.

These changes did not add much functionality, but they simplified the navigation and eliminated some hard to explain redirects and blocked accesses that annoyed users and generated questions. Essentially, Dashboard > Sessions now are only concerned with sessions Enrollments, while Dashboard > Hosting is focused on offering hosts visibility and control over their current and past hosted sessions, as well as submitted proposals.

Speaking of improving navigation of the Dashboard, I finally got around to converting the breadcrumb navigation to 100% human readable links. No more ugly unique ID on the breadcrumb.

Other than that, there were several authorization and access control issues that got ironed out. Not the most exciting update from my part, but there was a lot of work done under the hood.