Experimenting on e-Invitations
In Indonesia, it is a tradition for Muslims to celebrate the 40th day of someone’s passing, where they would read the Holy Quran together for that person. This event is called Tahlilan. Since my Grandmother passed away last December, today is her 40th day of passing, and my family dealing with grief. So we planned the Tahlilan.
A few days before the event I was asked to create an invitation for the event, which must include a zoom meeting link and a picture of my Grandmother. I noticed that these invitations are usually done in a very typical way, which is a poster of the event and some words to accompany it. I wanted to do something different.
My first thought was an e-Invitation in the form of the website. Why? You may ask. When it is possible to send the e-invites via email, which is probably more secure. However, most people in Indonesia don’t really check their emails since most social events are spread via Whatsapp or any kind of messaging app, and also social media such as Instagram, but since it is a private event, it is not a good idea to spread the news on social media. Another reason is that even though a website is public and random people can find and open it, even easier to hack if there aren’t any security measures taken. On this security issue, I remember when I took the Networks and Security course last year at University, websites that aren’t a threat or anyone’s target, is unlikely to get hacked, even though there are some random hackers who would randomly hack random websites, I believe that it is not likely. I understand these may be confusing words, and that I don’t remember where I read about this, I am sorry.
To start the project, I asked my parents' opinion about my idea of creating a literal e-invitation and deploying it on GitHub. I was surprised that they actually agreed to it. So I planned ahead.
First, I set my requirements, which are;
- The ability to have a countdown system, and when it reaches 0, a zoom meeting button will appear along with the meeting ID and password.
- a photo of my Grandmother.
- It needs to look like a card (somehow).
- There will be a video memorial, which is created by my father because I wanted it to look personal somehow and unique. I wanted people to get to remember her and feel connected.
- I wanted it to have a google reminder button but decided to delete it because it was confusing for my parents (also because in order for the button to work, the user will have to sign in to their Google account, which is unlikely for people who doesn’t use the Google Calendar itself)
Then I designed the UI on Adobe XD. Here’s the preview (kind of).
The image above is the one already exported for development purposes and my only copy of the original design, as I tweaked the original file for a poster that my Father asked me to make, and I made the changes directly on it so there’s not much left of it now (yay me).
The next step is to create the webpage itself. Since there isn’t much going on, it was quite simple to build because I only used basic HTML, CSS, and JS. As for the countdown feature, I decided to find an example of a code that works perfectly and tweaked it a bit to suit my needs (which isn’t much). I know I sort of cheated, but I knew I didn’t have much time to explore things on my own.
The images above are the end product, which was approved by my parents and uncle. Even so, after it was shared with groups and such, there was still a fear that people might not understand, so it was decided that we will still share the zoom meeting link by ourselves to each group.
Conclusion? Even though it was an awesome idea to automate things, we still need to understand who our audiences are and how they think, especially on how they would think is the easiest approach to do things, and that changing a user’s habit to things that are new and different is highly difficult, which in the end, would result going back to how things were…
In the end, I had fun in this project and would love to explore more about it, especially in developing a more secure version, so that not everyone can randomly have access to it. I will leave the website just as a tribute to my grandmother.
You can check out the website for yourself here.
