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Taking a look at the Wedding planner App – The Knot
The Knot app promises to make planning a wedding easy, seamless, and enjoyable. The Knot facilitates everything from dreaming up your vision with color palettes…
The Knot app promises to make planning a wedding easy, seamless, and enjoyable. The Knot facilitates everything from dreaming up your vision with color palettes and mood boards to getting it done with budgeting and timelines.
Unique interactives like a Wedding Style Quiz offer manageable first steps. You can even use the app to connect with local experts for a more personalized approach. The app supports every phase of the planning process: a Wedding Vendor Tab helps find and book venues, photographers, and DJs; a Registry and Budget tool helps with goal setting and tracking; a Guest List Manager and Wedding Website creator facilitates communication with guests. We’re especially impressed by the Task Lists & Timelines feature that helps to schedule different elements based on the target wedding date.
What Works Well
Registration was simple, capturing important information about dates, estimated budget, preferences about gifts for the registry, and pre-existing plans for venue and schedule. This information was used to personalize the home screen and was integrated into other features of the app as well. Registration also involves locking in your wedding website URL--- so, once you’ve registered with The Knot you already feel like you’ve accomplished something. We appreciated having the ability to create a website from the convenience of the mobile app. The Knot provides over 200 templates for your website and a friendly user interface. We liked that the registration interface clearly highlights what to do next based on the last action you’ve taken, and is featured at the top of the screen.
One of our favorite features is the pre populated checklists created by The Knot that update themselves on a monthly basis based on your target wedding date. The lists prioritize which tasks you should be focusing on depending how close to the wedding you are. They also keep track of goals specific to your wedding and timeline. We found these checklists to be a great way to stay organized, track progress, and make sure things don’t fall through the cracks.
We appreciated several aspects of how you choose and communicate with venues via The Knot app. Venue Information Pages provide photos as well as clear information on features, pricing, and more. Without the app, you would have to aggregate this information on your own, which is quite time-consuming. The handy Vendor Selection Chat Concierge Bot allowed us to provide more specific information about what we were looking for once we had browsed the Pages. It was helpful that all conversations with venues are aggregated into a central Message Center. You can even continue the conversation there without going to your email. It is so much more efficient having all the planning emails in one place, rather than being peppered by emails you later need to search for.
Aside from these organizational features, another favorite aspect of this app was The Knot Style quiz, a fun, Tinder-like experience where you answer questions about things like table settings, bouquets, dessert, decorations, and more. Once the style quiz is complete, The Knot creates a vision board and color scheme based on your answers. We liked the playful quality of the Style quiz, and found it to be a great jumping off point for design ideas.
Lastly, the registry on The Knot innovates on a traditional registry in that you not only have the ability to add items to your registry, but also to receive recommended items based on individual preference. You can import an existing registry and improve upon it as well. All of these features are well thought out by people who clearly have a ton of experience planning weddings.
What Could Use Improvement
While we appreciated certain aspects of registering on The Knot app, the options offered during the registration process were limited. When asked about things like date, budget, or number of guests, it was frustrating that you couldn’t respond with a numerical range; instead, you are forced to give one number, which, given how far ahead planning begins, is likely to be inaccurate. In addition, as soon as we finished registering we were immediately inundated with offers to save money on certain products. This felt premature and slightly aggressive, whereas if the same offers had been presented later in the process, it would have felt more appropriate and I would have potentially been ready to take advantage of them.
While we like that the home screen is personalized, we find the sheer amount of information presented overwhelming. The home screen attempts to segment information, but I still felt lost and would have preferred more guidance.
While The Vendor Selection/ Chat Concierge was helpful, I still felt limited. I would have preferred to be able to choose a number of different places or areas for the wedding so I could compare them rather than have to commit to one decision right away, or keep having to retry different options. Also, the chat bot automatically emailed venues I had browsed, which added unnecessary clutter to my inbox and probably wasted the time of many venues I wasn’t interested in booking with. While the Vendor Pages were helpful in showcasing what features were available, it wasn’t granular enough for me to understand what each venue had and what it was missing.
I was disappointed that the Style quiz, while fun, still didn’t hit the mark in terms of the aesthetic I was looking for. And for the registry, it would have been nice to be able to add items from stores that are outside The Knot affiliates.
The Knot, while helpful in some ways, overall had too many limitations for me to feel I was getting what I ultimately wanted. The Knot would need to take their app a few steps further to be the end-all-be-all place to plan a wedding.
Fueled Twists
First, we would really like to see The Knot reduce the overwhelming nature of the home feed and provide specific guidance on what to do next and why. Visually, this could mean bubbling up the most important features while deprioritizing others, so instead of spending energy figuring out what to do next, the user can spend that energy on the task itself.
Second, we would appreciate more depth in the Budget feature, which is currently very sparse. It shows what you have already spent, but I would have preferred to see estimated average costs per category alongside my spending, or a pie chart where you can adjust what percentage of your budget you’d like to spend in each category. Knowing how much most people end up spending in a given category is the kind of expertise we go to a wedding planner for, after all. A huge improvement throughout the app, and especially in budgets, would be allowing for ranges instead of hard numbers. This would be helpful for questions about guest count, dates, and more.
Third, a spreadsheet import feature would be very helpful in this app. I already had a spreadsheet of places I was looking into with quite granular information. It would have been great to be able to import such a sheet into The Knot to aggregate everything into one place.
And lastly, It would have been great if the Style Quiz not only resulted in a mood board and color palette, but by connecting you with specific venues that match your aesthetic, rather than finding venues then having to refer back to your mood board and see if it could be adapted.
While aesthetics and venue selection are important, there is a lot more that goes into making decisions about your wedding than is addressed in the app. For example, sometimes it’s important for a person to want an outdoors venue, or one that has both indoor and outdoor spaces; or sometimes you are weighing the benefits of two very different kinds of weddings, and wanting to price out both options. Or sometimes you want to compare all-inclusive options with options that are more DIY. These are the real early decisions that couples planning weddings are faced with, and we’re afraid The Knot falls short in addressing some of these key choices.
But enough about other people's apps.
