It's a strange question that crossed my mind - while we go out to design pretty interfaces for our web apps, here I am on a crappy blogger template (with 0 comments on the critique!) It does make me wonder if I've been a little blind in not seeing this earlier...
But really, out of curiousity - do leave a comment to tell me what you think about this question! Does it carry the same level of importance as in a web app?
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Review: Shopback
Criticizing the critic:
The presenters were extremely clear about what they set out to do, and the agenda of their presentation was clear:
The UI of ShopBack is crap.
I can't agree more. The whole dual language thing makes it not just look like a translation failure, but a cheap ripoff site where they sell you a whole bunch of fake goods (oops, sounds familiar).
They made great points about how the ads are a complete pain in the ass (sorry am I allowed to use language like that?) and how badly the T&Cs are listed. What's best is that they did also suggest improvements to it - and excellent ones at that, which should totally be given to the development team for implementation.
What really caught my attention about their presentation was how they raised the problem of having to advertise their other partners while at the same time trying to minimize the UI/UX problems by using the chrome extension. This is a great example of a real-world problem and other factors which hamper development, and that's a really great lesson to learn from them.
My gripe with this presentation is how they spent a too much time on the start showing off statistics that are totally unimpressive. Really, 7000 order, 10000 users? That's really on the lame side - why bother putting it in bold and giving it all that time? Negative example lah... I think they should have played to the strong points of ShopBack instead (though there really aren't that many). Lesson: Choose the numbers you present properly. This was 2 slides (10% of the entire presentation) of useless stuff that doesn't convince anyone to care about ShopBack at all
My thoughts on ShopBack:
Interesting idea, that cannot stand alone. It needs to be better integrated with its' partners. Currently the flow is
ShopBack -> Partner -> ShopBack (The last page you visit must be ShopBack)
Instead, to make this successful, it needs to be
Partner -> ShopBack -> Partner
Let's face it, ShopBack is tiny compared to its' partners. Their current model only works if they are larger than their partners, thus making them a good landing page. (Which, as seen from the stats in the presentation, isn't true).
The presenters were extremely clear about what they set out to do, and the agenda of their presentation was clear:
The UI of ShopBack is crap.
I can't agree more. The whole dual language thing makes it not just look like a translation failure, but a cheap ripoff site where they sell you a whole bunch of fake goods (oops, sounds familiar).
They made great points about how the ads are a complete pain in the ass (sorry am I allowed to use language like that?) and how badly the T&Cs are listed. What's best is that they did also suggest improvements to it - and excellent ones at that, which should totally be given to the development team for implementation.
What really caught my attention about their presentation was how they raised the problem of having to advertise their other partners while at the same time trying to minimize the UI/UX problems by using the chrome extension. This is a great example of a real-world problem and other factors which hamper development, and that's a really great lesson to learn from them.
My gripe with this presentation is how they spent a too much time on the start showing off statistics that are totally unimpressive. Really, 7000 order, 10000 users? That's really on the lame side - why bother putting it in bold and giving it all that time? Negative example lah... I think they should have played to the strong points of ShopBack instead (though there really aren't that many). Lesson: Choose the numbers you present properly. This was 2 slides (10% of the entire presentation) of useless stuff that doesn't convince anyone to care about ShopBack at all
My thoughts on ShopBack:
Interesting idea, that cannot stand alone. It needs to be better integrated with its' partners. Currently the flow is
ShopBack -> Partner -> ShopBack (The last page you visit must be ShopBack)
Instead, to make this successful, it needs to be
Partner -> ShopBack -> Partner
Let's face it, ShopBack is tiny compared to its' partners. Their current model only works if they are larger than their partners, thus making them a good landing page. (Which, as seen from the stats in the presentation, isn't true).
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Week 3 - So somehow my stupidity has arrived here
So I realized I never explained NUSocial - hence the title.
NUSocial is meant to be the one-stop group management system for NUS - primarily designed for halls and CCAs, but the more I look at the functionality the more I think it can be even used for faculties, departments, even modules. Coming from Science, everyday my inbox is spammed by OCA, OSA, OCS, IT, Rubiah (whoever this really is), EUC, Math Department... You name it lah. Seriously? Who doesn't delete all this indiscriminately? I only want to receive the CFRG ones (cos they might land me jobs!)
Now imagine all this put into a feed, together with your CCA, hall, (whatever funny subscriptions you can think of) groups, combined with event-signup features. No more flooding emails, no more messages getting too long in Whatsapp, no more missing posts in FB drowned in the sheer volume of Pokemon Go screenshots.
Imagine always being able to find the information you want, and fast
Imagine managing your groups and events with peace of mind knowing people don't have to come back to bug you for info (provided you set everything up nicely lah)
We thought it'd be a good idea. Personally I think it's mildly useful, but will take a lot of onboarding to work. I guess a lot of my apprehension comes from NUS's refusal to use student projects - really, there are so many GREAT CS3216 projects out there, but look at what NUS has been doing? They're recommending using the CORS module scheduler. Like seriously guys, NUSMods exists. (I hope someone from NUS reads this and realizes what idiots they are (Am I allowed to write this?))
Basically the point is that building projects for NUS might be really cool and really useful - but end of the day the school won't support it, and we'll always have to fight to grab students ourselves. Which is kinda lame, esp. if ideas are good. In our context specifically, I think my inbox will still be flooded, even if NUSocial is an instant success with students.
I do however still see that we might possibly have a good student user-base. What's more, with the functionality we've put in, I think it's got potential to expand beyond these simple use-cases to serve modules and project groups, etc. (okay a project group probably doesn't need such a large feature set) - and I suddenly have an idea to add a file upload system. Whoops! Time to run it through the team
Anyway, reflections for this week:
Assignment 1:
Spent the week not doing so much - some review, some prep for the mid-assignment submission, and a day of trying to make our landing page look acceptable >< Unfortunately that's competing wtih all the other groups - who have really nice landing pages. Damn. We're obviously not a very artistic group, and I've been trying to look up web design principles. Haven't found any particularly good resources though.
Assignment 2:
Critiquing FastJobs - I looked mostly at the web app, various members of my team looked at Android and iOS. We're going to focus on the mobile versions in the end after looking through. I must say that the web app is terrible. Plenty of bugs, some links to functionality that doesn't work, inconsistencies and so on. It does serve a nice niche of part-time jobs but beyond that honestly I don't see what's the big deal about it. We had a really interesting discussion on Monday about what's good, bad and ugly, as well as what we can do on top of it. (But I'll leave that for the presentation right? So you won't see it here)
NUSocial is meant to be the one-stop group management system for NUS - primarily designed for halls and CCAs, but the more I look at the functionality the more I think it can be even used for faculties, departments, even modules. Coming from Science, everyday my inbox is spammed by OCA, OSA, OCS, IT, Rubiah (whoever this really is), EUC, Math Department... You name it lah. Seriously? Who doesn't delete all this indiscriminately? I only want to receive the CFRG ones (cos they might land me jobs!)
Now imagine all this put into a feed, together with your CCA, hall, (whatever funny subscriptions you can think of) groups, combined with event-signup features. No more flooding emails, no more messages getting too long in Whatsapp, no more missing posts in FB drowned in the sheer volume of Pokemon Go screenshots.
Imagine always being able to find the information you want, and fast
Imagine managing your groups and events with peace of mind knowing people don't have to come back to bug you for info (provided you set everything up nicely lah)
We thought it'd be a good idea. Personally I think it's mildly useful, but will take a lot of onboarding to work. I guess a lot of my apprehension comes from NUS's refusal to use student projects - really, there are so many GREAT CS3216 projects out there, but look at what NUS has been doing? They're recommending using the CORS module scheduler. Like seriously guys, NUSMods exists. (I hope someone from NUS reads this and realizes what idiots they are (Am I allowed to write this?))
Basically the point is that building projects for NUS might be really cool and really useful - but end of the day the school won't support it, and we'll always have to fight to grab students ourselves. Which is kinda lame, esp. if ideas are good. In our context specifically, I think my inbox will still be flooded, even if NUSocial is an instant success with students.
I do however still see that we might possibly have a good student user-base. What's more, with the functionality we've put in, I think it's got potential to expand beyond these simple use-cases to serve modules and project groups, etc. (okay a project group probably doesn't need such a large feature set) - and I suddenly have an idea to add a file upload system. Whoops! Time to run it through the team
Anyway, reflections for this week:
Assignment 1:
Spent the week not doing so much - some review, some prep for the mid-assignment submission, and a day of trying to make our landing page look acceptable >< Unfortunately that's competing wtih all the other groups - who have really nice landing pages. Damn. We're obviously not a very artistic group, and I've been trying to look up web design principles. Haven't found any particularly good resources though.
Assignment 2:
Critiquing FastJobs - I looked mostly at the web app, various members of my team looked at Android and iOS. We're going to focus on the mobile versions in the end after looking through. I must say that the web app is terrible. Plenty of bugs, some links to functionality that doesn't work, inconsistencies and so on. It does serve a nice niche of part-time jobs but beyond that honestly I don't see what's the big deal about it. We had a really interesting discussion on Monday about what's good, bad and ugly, as well as what we can do on top of it. (But I'll leave that for the presentation right? So you won't see it here)
Friday, August 19, 2016
Week 2 - NUSocial is almost ready!
Quite glad this week - we've managed to churn out (majority) of the functionality for NUSocial. It's been quite the cool week, with the accomplishment of the week clearly being the replacement for javascript alerts (which really suck, seriously - totally remind me of spam popups). Kind of enjoy doing this kinda small little cute stuff, yet at the same time I really hate doing design work cos I'm really pretty color blind.
Hint: Fire up the console and try alert2('hello world!') (Idk why it bugs up sometimes here on blogger, but if that happens just refresh the page ><)
Hint: Fire up the console and try alert2('hello world!') (Idk why it bugs up sometimes here on blogger, but if that happens just refresh the page ><)
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Week 1 - So It Begins
So, CS3216, painful it is.
Really feels like I'm only doing one mod.
Choose to do assignment 1 in rails, something familiar, but still the enormity and the gargantuanity of it horrifies me. It's crazy yet fun, and insanely challenging. NUSocial is a rather interesting idea, yet at the same time I feel the fear that it will flop
Suppose that's the norm.
Really feels like I'm only doing one mod.
Choose to do assignment 1 in rails, something familiar, but still the enormity and the gargantuanity of it horrifies me. It's crazy yet fun, and insanely challenging. NUSocial is a rather interesting idea, yet at the same time I feel the fear that it will flop
Suppose that's the norm.
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