Team 18 Project Proposal

Introduction:
There are various different kinds of events in NUS everyday, such as career talk, student events. To organize such events, organizers usually need to:

• select a date and book the venue
• design the event flow
• send invitation email to potential participants.
• gather response from targeted participant group

Usually organizers do not use external systems that integrates these functions together because they are complicated to use and usually not free. Thus they have to resort to different systems to complete these steps. It is easy to see that this is a tedious process.

The purpose of our project is to design a web-based application to ease the flow of event organization in NUS, from date, venue selection to event registration. With the help of our application, the event organizer  will be able to arrange an event simply by clicking his mouse in front of a computer.


Literature Review:
There are several similar event management applications that have already be implemented. It is pretty sure that an NUS event can be organized using those applications. However,there are mainly two drawbacks in those applications.Firstly, most of such applications have a very complex user interface. The picture below is a screen snapshot of an event application.

Although reasonably well designed, there are unnecessary options which makes users tired of reading. Our goal is to make the application specific for events in NUS; to remove unnecessary functions and excessive complexities so as to help users achieve higher efficiency.


Functionalities with sketches of interface:
Venue & Date selection and Booking:

Overall, we are going provide users four functions: Venue & Date selection and booking, program design, budget management and invitation management. The four steps are listed on the left side of all our interfaces so that the users will directly know that what is the flow of our application and users will be able to go to any step by clicking on these four button, which will give users maximum freedom.
The first function we provide is Venue & Date selection and booking. The venue is grouped by faculties. This is a reasonable way of grouping since different kinds of activities may taken places in different faculty. For example, industries talks are most like to be taken in Engineering faculty, science report may be taken place in science faculty. Once the users has chosen the venue. The information of the venue will be displayed such as the location, capacity and facility.
The date selection is implemented as a calendar. Users can make their decision simply by clicking on the day in calendar. Once he selects the date, available time slots of the day will be displayed.
Program Design:

The second function we provide is program design. Some programs, such as lunch, closing speech, etc., are by default displayed in the "table". Users can drag and drop those programs into the event's timetable on the right side. Of course, user can add more activities into the "table" by clicking the plus symbol on the top up corner of the "table".
Budget Management:

The third function we provide is budget management.  Users can enter description of an item (including item name and cost) and add it to the expenses table on the right side. The all the expenses are summarized in the expenses table. And user can generate a budget report using our application (not shown on the sketch above).
Invitation Management:

The last function we provide is invitation management. Sending invitation email is integrated into our application. If user need to get RSVP from potential participants, he can click Request RSVP button. User can use our application to design RSVP form as well.

User can add different fields they need into the RSVP form and a preview of the RSVP form will be displayed on the right side of the screen.

If potential participants reply, our application will be notified. Then the organizer may view RSVP statistics using our application. Moreover, users can export the statistics to excel.

Application on NUS officer side:

Once an application has been made, our system will generate an email to NUS officer side. Then, the officer can log in to our system as a facilitator to accept or decline the application. Furthermore, there will be specific interface in our application for facilitators to view/edit bookings of facilities under his/her management.

Assumptions:

NUS will to provide us with an API to access NUS database, such as NUS email and venue availability database.
Strength of each team member:
Christine Lisun: Design interface
Xu Yecheng: Programming ability.
Xiang Yongzhou:Good team work ability.
Huang Cheng::Programming ability.
Our strength lay in different fields. We could help each other in this project and make it a successful application.