DemoProof of concept with made-up participants. Nothing here is a real booking and no email is sent. Open the staff view

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Duncan Place Community Choir Tuesdays

Tuesdays, 7:00 – 8:45pm at Duncan Place.

20 places left

Tuesdays, 7:00 – 8:45pm
A prepaid block, one payment. 8 weeks · 18 Aug – 6 Oct — £45 for the 8-week block. Enrol once and every session in the block is yours.
Duncan Place Community Hub, 4 Duncan Place, Leith, Edinburgh EH6 8HW

Sing with your neighbours — no auditions, no need to read music. £45, to be paid in advance of the block starting, on a first come – first served basis (which is exactly what this booking page automates).

Please arrive five minutes beforehand so classes can start on time.

Request a place

Places are filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Rather talk to a person? Email events@duncanplace.org or call 0131 364 4351 — booking online is never the only way in.

What’s changed — and why

Design notes on this booking page · Duncan Place Community Choir

1A number, where your site only has an adjective

Today the page says “spaces are limited”, and the Monday class says it is “currently full” — in prose, written by hand, true until it isn’t. Here it is a live count that changes as people join and leave. The capacity itself is our guess, because you have never published one; staff need to confirm the real number before this goes anywhere near a real class.

2One payment, the whole block

Your own Choir page says “£45, to be paid in advance… first come – first served”. That sentence is a job someone does by hand: watch the inbox, decide who was first, chase the money. This page is that sentence, automated — enrol, pay once, every session in the block is yours.

3The waiting list has a position, and it moves itself

Today it is “please email events@duncanplace.org to be added to the waiting list”— a list in an inbox, in somebody’s head. Here a person joins and is told they are number three. When somebody gives up a place, the top of the list is emailed automatically, at any hour, with nobody remembering to check.

4A queue that is ambiguous is not a queue

We raced eight people at one free place. The first version handed out positions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 7 — two people told they were fifth, nobody sixth. It was fixed before it ever ran (the ordering is now sequence-backed, not clock-backed). Worth knowing because that is the class of mistake an email list makes quietly, every week, and nobody ever finds out.

5Nobody pays to stand in a queue

A prepaid block asks for payment only when there is an actual place. Join a waiting list and you pay nothing, because you have nothing yet. Obvious when said out loud, and precisely the sort of thing a generic ticketing tool gets wrong.

6Giving up a place needs no account

No login, no password, no “create an account to manage your booking”. The confirmation email carries one link that releases the place. That matters more than it sounds: the waiting list only works if leaving is as easy as joining, and the person dropping out at 9pm on a Sunday is the one who makes it move.

7We ask for as little as we can get away with

Email is “to confirm the place and nothing else”. Access needs are “seen only by the class leader, and deleted after the session”. Phone is optional. That is not decoration on the form — a community class roster is personal data, and the least you hold is the least you have to protect, explain and eventually delete.

8The inbox and the phone still work

events@duncanplace.org and the phone number stay on this page, deliberately. This is for the people who would rather not ring — not a replacement for the ones who would. Any class can go back to email-only by changing one field.

9Every person on this page is invented

The participants are fictional and their addresses use example.com, which is reserved precisely so it can never reach a real inbox. The card is a test number and nothing is charged. Real names go in only after the privacy notice, retention schedule and processor agreement — a first task, not an afterthought, because handling people’s data properly is half of what is being shown here.

Prepared for Duncan Place by Michal Szyszka · every figure quoted here comes from duncanplace.org, your Terms of Let or your OSCR accounts