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)