Seating is a critical part of the guest experience at many events, and this update introduces many significant improvements to how you can create and manage seating with zkipster. We've heard a wide variety of your requests, and this update is the first of three parts focusing on expanding and improving the whole seating experience.
This update in particular focuses on improvements to the web seating tool, upgrading how the mobile apps handle seating, and data syncing improvements across all devices.
Web New Features: Seating Redesigned
Seating Loading and Infinite Scrolling: The process of how seating charts are loaded has been rebuilt and now loads in sections as you scroll, resulting in significantly increased performance and eliminating many cases of timeouts and errors on loading, especially for large guest lists.
Drag & Drop Tables: Adding tables to a floorplan is now done by dragging them from the left side menu and dropping them in the desired position, replacing the click that created a table in a preset point on the chart.
Table Multi-Selection: You can now select and move more than one table at once, making rearranging floor plans much easier and faster. By clicking the "multi-select" icon below the zoom icons, you can select a group of tables and drag them to a new position.
Upright Table Labels: When rotating tables, labels are now kept in upright position at all times, keeping them easy to read regardless of the table angle.
Full Guest Details: Clicking a guest seat opens a popup that summarizes details of the guest seated there. This popup can now be expanded (by clicking on the icon in the lower right corner) to show all information about that guest, providing an easy and fast way to access full guest data directly from the floorplan.
New Guest Filters: There is a new filter section on the guest list that filters guests by table, guest list, seated/unseated, status, and table.
New Guest Counters: The number of seated guests out of the total number of seats is now permanently displayed in the lower left corner of the guest seating screen. The search bar now has a total guest count underneath it as well. Note that the search bar count presents the total number of guests being listed according to the filters and search query entered.
Overhauled Guest Interface: The whole guest interface (listing, details, and editing) has been redesigned to improve legibility, incorporate the new features, and make the web and mobile experiences more similar. Guest editing is now done within the listing, replacing the old popup that was shown in the middle of the screen, and is triggered by clicking the arrow on each guest.
Improved Table Duplication: Duplicated tables are now selected by default to be easily placed in the desired position. Newly duplicated tables no longer appear behind the original table.
Safe Table Editing: Seats are no longer overwritten when editing tables and saving new changes. This helps safely seat and reseat of guests while someone has the seating floorplan opened without the risk of accidentally overwriting data.
App New Features: Upgraded Seating & Sync
Please note that the new seating features are not yet available for Android devices as of this update.
Seating Floorplan Editing: You can now manipulate tables and configure them on the iOS app in a very similar way to the web interface. Admins and Event Hosts now see an "Edit Floorplan" switch on the seating map which activates floorplan editing mode.
Seating Redesign: The guest list view on the seating screen has been redesigned to accommodate the new web features detailed above.
Guest Filtering on Seating: There are now a new set of guest list filtering options (seated status, color, table, guest list and status) that can be used together with guest search.
Rebuilt and Improved Sync:
The whole data sync process is now done in the background without blocking the app UI, improving consistent app usage over the course of an entire event.
App performance during check-in peak periods at large events is significantly improved.
You can now freely interact with the app during the sync process - loading overlays blocking usage have been removed. The only exception is trying to change guest data while it's actively being synced, which will be blocked by the app in order to preserve data integrity and prevent data loss.
There is a new sync notification at the top of the screen to alert you when data is being synced. If a sync fails for any reason, offline mode is activated and a persistent message is displayed on top of the app to alert you that offline mode is active, until the sync successfully completes.
Event changes are now synced to the app without needing to navigate back to event list. For example, changing a custom field on the web is now updated on the mobile app on the next sync, or immediately if you trigger a manual sync.
Improvements & Fixes
Seat Number of +1s is now included in the event report
User Picture thumbnail is now displayed on the top right corner
Miscellaneous minor fixes and improvements