(13) Probably the Final post before Steps

After much debate, our team decided to changed our project title to Griddit. I would think that Griddit fits better to our idea because you can really play around with our sites, creating whatever you want, even a collection of maybe say Taylor Swift MVs.

Progress report 2
Once again, consequence of not reading the PDF. Sigh, my team didn't know that the presentation was graded until we got the feedback. My lack of energy due to my my flu did not help definitely, so we suffered quite a bit for the presentation component. Oddly, there weren't any questions after our presentation except for one on how we did the synchronised Youtube video. But there were a few issues raised in our feedback and I'll address it below.

(1) Not Mobile friendly
- Difficult for Griddit to be mobile friendly. When you have many things going on, the small mobile screen size is really not ideal. Furthermore, our key widget is video. Typically, mobile will launch the full screen video when played, so it defeats the purpose of Griddit. So for now, we will still focus on desktop experience.

(2) UI is bare
- Uhm yeap, it is. Improvements of layout coming along the way! :)

(3) App is only useful for bigger events
- Yes i agree with you. Smaller events wouldn't need livestream due to lack of demand and think of the logistic cost of livestream for these smaller events, it's simply not economical. Also we need to consider why people create events. They create for people to be there. People adds on to the atmosphere. So a scale is necessary to justify for a livestream.
- Think of why people need livestream -- Geographical distance (Football), and lots of attention (Elections).
- Weddings is not really possible because once again, logistic cost (if you are streaming your wedding for overseas guests), and also why would you want your guests to be hooked onto their phones? And Griddit is not meant to be mobile friendly due to the nature of its idea.

(4) Legality of streaming
- Yes, it has been an area of concern. So to keep it simple, I think what we have been doing so far is to prove there's a demand for this and people would use it. Judging by the fact that 1 line of marketing could get us 115 live users, even I myself was taken aback by the numbers. In the long run, working with event organisers will really be the way to go. It will be exciting if that happens!! :)

(5) Uses for other people
- We did not illustrate this well enough. But because of the customisability, the website can even allow you to create a collection of Youtube videos, say Taylor Swift's MVs. Like a pinterest of your favourite videos. We touched and go on this, and could have talked more about it!
- Sync youtube videos allow you to connect with your LDR partner! No more "1,2,3... PLAY!" haha..

Alright, that's it for this post. Looking forward to STEPS day! :)

Ciao
Mei Lan

(12) Carousell sharing

I'm a frequent user of Carousell so it's cool to be in a talk with the founders about the company.

Monetization was one of the key issues I have with this app. They currently do not have any way of getting revenue, and their "asset" is probably the massive user base. But apparently, they have monetization plans! Some of their plans as below + my own views:

(1) Taking a cut from payments on Carousell

Pros: For convenience sake, people WOULD pay, as long as they do not overcharge. For instance, 1% of $20 is only $0.20. And given the amount of transactions, I think it's a pretty solid source of revenue.

Cons: Hmm, to move from free service to freemium is always risky. Furthermore, there's actually a lot of young users (yes, xiao mei mei especially) on Carousell, so these small little charges may turn them off and still opt for cash payments. However, I don't think this is a big issue because given that all the xmm and xdd (xiao mei mei & xiao di di) today owns a smartphone and even personal laptop, $0.20 to them should be negligible.

(2) Charging for listing luxury expensive items like cars and houses.

Pros: Lucas suggested $10 - $20 for such listings. This sum is really small compared to the sale price of the cars/houses, so people will be deterred to pay VS paying an agent to sell for you.

Cons: Ehhh.... Selling huge luxury items like cars and properties on Carousell seems unsafe and weird. And it may run into legal issues because of the transfer in ownership. I feel that keeping it to normal, smaller items is better. I definitely wouldn't like Carousell to be like Taobao, selling all kinds of things including BAD DEBT. omg.

Definition of bad debt: A debt that is not collectible and therefore worthless to the creditor.

It's quite amazing for Carousell to reach such scale and success, given that everything was done over a summer holiday. They did intensive marketing, really really intensive marketing. They strategically used their identities as students to market to students via school camps, and have a lot of support from NUS Enteprise as well. And honestly, I even saw their sticker in the toilet cubicle haha.. Don't think this is the same in Male's toilets? Since 70% of Carousell users are Female. heh. I attribute part of their success to their aggressive marketing - they made it so pervasive such that you can't miss it. Abit spammish and can irritate, but well, it worked :)

Ciao

Mei Lan

(11) 2nd consultation

It's been long since I posted anything. I admit, I have been delaying CS3216 project for a bit due to job applications and interviews, networking, my other school projects and FSP that requires me to also go out and speak to companies and people.

Spoke to Colin and received quite a number of useful feedback, and also he managed to connect my group with some of his connections to seek feedback from. Thanks! :)

Issues with Marketing
(1) Eventspark basically has no specific target audience
This has been extremely tough and it's giving us millions of problems. So it means, if we have a football event, we need football fans. If we have Taylor Swift concert, we need Swifties. Marketing efforts are diverse and massive when you manage the events yourself. Cost wise, it will not be effective. But at this CS3216 scale, it does make some sense. But it's quite a gamble-- we have to choose the events wisely to attract enough interest.

(2) How about Marketing to event companies?
Speaking to companies without legit prototypes...... I don't know how will they think. I am hesitant definitely (well, I don't want to get blacklisted by the events industry haha), but based on my experiences, the number people who are willing to talk and share always far exceeds my expectations :) Colin said something quite interesting- pitch, and not say "what do you think of this idea?". The latter automatically launches people into a critical state to critique your app than to think of the possible use/integration with their company.

(3) Number of Live events
It has to be live to justify the chat there. Hmmm, but how many live events are there exactly? Quarterly results of companies maybe. But probably will get banned. Why not go global? Okay, so I went on Livestream.com to check out what kind of events people do. Usually for popular events, the number of people watching Live would be around 2k-3k. But these events, oh man, Karbala religious event in Iraq. HMMMM. Ok. I'll focus on sports events.

I have to be honest that I doubted the idea a little more than once. How often do we have a live broadcast event, with people wanting to chat online, and people want to monitor the tweets, etc? And our live streaming gets banned by some organisers too.

Sigh, I'm having a very incoherent day. Will come back with better thoughts.

Ciao
Mei Lan

(10) Paypal + Updates on Final Project

Today's sharing was by Paypal's Lawrence and Prof Anderson on data security. Lawrence breezed through his work at Paypal and gave us his take on monetizing our ideas. This was the feedback for our group:

1. Paid widgets
2. Tickets for livestream of paid events (work with event organizers)
3. Product placement adverts

(2) is pretty cool. We have not really thought of making specific events private for certain event organisers and make it like having a ticket. This will really be amazing if there's a market for it. Imagine, livestream ticket sales for Taylor Swift concert. It targets on people who are more budgeted (e.g poor students like me) yet wants to have the closest thing to actual live. And the chat widgets will allow these online viewers to interact amongst themselves. I'm pretty sure this is a market that is untapped. It will be profitable for the companies as well because the margins is quite attractive + can sell merchandise online as well, just have to put in effort for live filming so that nothing goes wrong. There will not be seats issue, and people can join anytime they want to, even buying the online livestream ticket 1 min before the show or even when it's ongoing! This can attract many spontaneous and last minute purchases as it maximises the buying time for people.

Final project updates

Hiccups along the way.

(1) Definition of competitors

This got me thinking. How do we actually define who are our competitors? 

I was frustrated with myself when my group actually got stuck at this fundamental question. We got stuck because we were thinking about who else offered the same services as we did. Then things like "But we are completely a new idea, so technically speaking we don't have competitors!" pops up and I'M LIKE "NO". and YET I didn't know how to put myself across clearly in explaining this question then. I went home to think, and this was my verdict in defining competitors-- competitors are the ones who are serving your customers.

I came up with a simple thought process of knowing who's your competitors.

- Who are your target audience?

- How are you going to get them?

- WHERE are you getting them? 

The 3rd question is the most crucial. WHERE. Not geographical wise, but which other services are they using now and you can provide them with more, so they will switch over to us. Then think of your core product/service. For us, our idea's core is events video streaming, and therefore competitors would be Twitch and Youtube and not our widgets like Twitter and chat rooms. 

(2) UX

Lol. We spent like 1.5 hours debating whether to provide layout templates. There's very different perspective of what's easy or difficult for the user. Shall see what's the feedback on Wed consultation.

aww double chin never looked so cute hahahaha

(9) Assignment 3: TL;DR

My team of coders has been working so hard for TL;DR. Link: www.tldr.sshz.org

TL;DR is basically an mobile friendly Web that helps to make casual reading better. It extracts out the subheadings of each article and collapse into tabs that you can expand if you want to read the content under the subheadings. It's just like a content page for articles. One glance you can see what's all the article about and only expand those you are interested.

Saves time, minimise title baiting, and make reading more efficient.

Conceptualising this idea was quite a challenge. My group mates aren't into reading (lol) so they didn't quite resonate with the app at first. Furthermore, I didn't know if it will work, crawling information from websites, and breaking down into subheadings. Reading is something that depends on flow and context and thus choosing the right articles sources that can be suitably crawled was extremely difficult.

The app had a lot of bugs initially. To the extent I even felt paiseh that to complain non-stop to the coders (lol) what I didn't like when I was testing it. Hahaha whoops. But I'm really appreciative that my team were really nice and funny Hahaha. They will fix it and they did eventually Hahaha.

Half a semester is gone. I've learnt really a lot in this module. What's more relevant for me would me conceptualising of ideas, marketing and also communicating with others. I remember finding it real hard to understand what the coders were talking about during Assignment 1. Too much technical terms that I find it hard to keep up. But now it has become better. This is really a bonus for me. I never thought communication could be a problem until I started working with people of different background and realised all of us speak different languages. Besides this, I also managed to check 1 thing off the "what I want to learn from CS3216 list" and that is to understand what's technically possible and what's not. For someone without technical knowledge in programming, you really won't have an idea what's feasible and what's out of reach until you witness the process and see ideas come alive.

Ciao
Mei Lan

(8) Internal Pitching Party

Just ended our Internal Pitching Party.

External pitches

Quickdesk - Gamification of sales... Unfortunately, as much as I think the platform is awesome, I don't quite buy this idea. I think, salespeople are/should be naturally driven to get more sales and they wouldn't need gamification to spur them to create more sales. Perhaps they can have a collaborative tool to show team sales effort, whether they have hit their KPI collectively.

Tindon- Hahaha, i really lol at this. I think it's really quite interesting but sad that it doesn't fulfill the matching part because I would foresee so many people will just use it to enjoy the couple offer. Two girls can also use it, (well celebrate LGBT....), so it's kinda just an Entertainer app.

Internal pitches

Travelplanner+ - I need to say. This is my dream app for like 1-2 years? I have been dreaming of an app that uses algorithm to optimise travel plans. However, after travelling for so long, I realised such apps defeats the purpose of traveling. Hmm, but I need to say, for those who loves an itinerary, this may be the perfect app for them. Anyway, there's a site that does optimization of travel planner- Triphobo, so maybe the group can improvise from here because Triphobo seems to have good partnerships with other travel sites.

My group's pitch- Okay lah, we kiasu. We pitch 2 ideas hahaha.. Jingwen's idea has received really positive reviews and excitement, hahaha... I still remember that elections night where our chat went crazy haha. Alright, seems potential. Hahaha my only concern is that they may not be enough such events and streaming live broadcast may infringe copyright. For instance, Apple event is pretty exclusive. Maybe get blocked. 

The other idea AnswerMe was a half baked idea that we thought of in the morning itself.  Hahaha, the feedback generally was that it is difficult to compete with search giants like google. Perhaps we didn't evaluate the user behaviour when it comes for solving some problems. Sometimes, people just want to know answers. And it's difficult to get people from Reddit. It's a very closed door community, because granted that Reddit's UI sucks so badly and yet they have such a great community, the loyalty is real strong. And I learnt that community management can be more difficult than app development. Which is painfully true.

Ciao

Mei Lan

(7) External Pitching Party + Assignment 3 updates

Cool to see what are some apps people out there want to make. 

Some pretty unrealistic. Some there's potential.

Tuition apps:

Okay, I have been tutoring for past four years and I understand what kind of gap they are trying to address... But if a small scale pitching party has like 2-3 different people pitching the same idea.... Chances are, it's probably an idea many people has thought of... In fact, NTU students already started Hace like few months ago... And why keep forcing kids to go tuition............

I was quite interested in one of the ideas pitched. The one that is similar Zopim. I spoke to Gerald, the incharge, more about the idea, UI problems for consumers, consumer behavior in putting the reviews things on websites, and also privacy issues when you crawl reviews from social media. Honestly, I am positive about this idea. I see a lot of potential in influencing customers at point of purchase. 

Oh btw, our classmate Vicky wrote a blogpost on one of the ideas pitched. Okay la, I'm biased. I mention it because I really agree with her hahahaha. Exactly same sentiments when I was listening to the pitch.

Rant from the pitching party:
Don't create an app/website BECAUSE you want to exit with a buyout. You should be focused on creating something that's good enough to be acquired. Focus on the product, not the end point. And so, don't try to bs us students that it's all about buyouts, get a few millions and we spilt money and retire, enjoy life.......

ASSIGNMENT 3

Working with 3 coders this time round. So it means, I'm taking up the designer + business role.

✔ Idea settled.

It's quite a practical app. Pitched the idea to some of the fellow CS3216, seems okay to them too.

✔ Logo done

Simple logo ftw.

✔  Mockups

The idea this time round is much simpler than Assignment 1 Exchangehunt. Exchangehunt has SOOO many things. Unless I'm missing out anything.... hahaha. Anyway, my mockups are 75% done? I've already written down UI stuffs that I want to clarify with my team next meeting. So should be on the right track.

✔ Front end + backend

Coders working hard. Thanks dudes.

CUTENESS BONUS for the long weekend ahead!

かつおだよ

A photo posted by KATSUO (@isokatsuo) on Aug 31, 2015 at 5:49am PDT

Ciao

Mei Lan

(6) Assignment 1: Exchangehunt

Oh man, I'm so lagged for this post....

EXCHANGEHUNT (www.exchangehunt.io)
Overall, I'm very pleased with what my team has created! Exchangehunt; basically a website to connect exchange students together. In Exchangehunt, one is able to find others from different universities, see where are these students going for exchange and contact them on the platform. Those who have gone on exchange would understand how useful this portal would be. Just imagine, you are travelling to say Spain for a weekend, and you want to be budget and stay at someone's couch and you are paranoid sleeping at some strangers' couch and you want to know if there's Singaporean exchange student at Spain and.... yeah, something like that. And exchangehunt would come into picture.

Other than the end product, some thoughts:
(1) Team is very impt.
My team is made up of Jingwen (coder), Mingyi (coder) and Seiyee (designer), plus me (business). Probably the most diverse team. The team worked really well together, honestly. Four of us will meet at the same place - and the coders code, while Seiyee and I worked on the UI/UX and design all these stuffs and should there are anything we need to talk about, we just discuss together since we are all present. Really efficient this way and I'm super glad for them that there weren't any drama mama shit at all.

(2) Idea
One of my most important lessons learnt for idea generation:
-Focus on who's your target audience.
-Don't be overly ambitious.
-Don't get too carried away.
I'm glad we were able to scale down Exchangehunt. We were able to focus on and refining the certain features that is intended for the target audiences.
Hmm, I read some blogs that some teams seem to not have consensus over the idea and things were on a rough patch... You need an idea that your team is willing to believe in (even if they don't) to get things going.  Just remember: half hearted means half f*** job. 

(3) Struggles
Hmmm. I struggled when I can't contribute because I'm not a technical person. It's more of an internal struggle. I hate not being able to do things (LOL). But I realised it's all about how I see it.  (Refer to my past posts about all my ramblings of not being able to help a lot.) In Assignment 3, I better found how I can contribute to the team. In fact, i picked up some skills from the coders and designers to effectively communicate and do things.

That's all! :)

Ciao
Mei Lan

(5) Critique on Apple Music iPad app

APPLE MUSIC

I'm going to focus on 2 points: UI/UX and Commercial potential.

UI/UX
The group analysed the annoying points of Apple Music.

• Wall of text on artists page that is distracting and useless
• Buttons everywhere
• Dropdown bar has too many options
• Unclear texts-- can't read. 

These are true painpoints for Apple music users and really confusing for users. Creating a good UX is extremely important for Apple who's rolling out a new service. Apple already has an advantage as an established brands, so user acquisitions is not really a difficult thing for them since there's so many diehard Apple fans who's super willing to try any Apple service/product. But face it, users will still leave if the UI/UX sucks. And Apple always champion on simplicity, so a confusing and messy app certainly turns their loyal fans off a lot!!

Group3 also mentioned that Apple should just focus on the music service and execute it perfectly.

Apple's connect service tries to be like Instagram where people can like, comment and share. However, it is not working with people as the number of likes is pathetic. It is important for the group to point out this part because it shows that Apple Music is still at an infant stage and further refinement has to be done to enhance the app. Also, a very important lesson to all new apps like Apple Music: Focus on your core product; what works for others do not necessarily work for you.

Commercial potential

Commercial potential is extremely important for music streaming services because the music industry is booming and more and more people are turning to music streaming.

The group calculated that Apple will rake in $99.9million per month with a mere 1% subscription from it's current user base. This number is based on the number of 1 billion iOS devices shipped. But there's a slight flaw in this calculation because number of iOS devices shipped ≠ number of Apple users. In fact, most Apple users have at least 2 iOS devices. So they would only need to pay for 1 price $9.90. Also, with the family membership, up to 6 people in the family can share the cost of $14.99/month.

Instead of giving the estimated subscription value in numbers, maybe the group can focus on how artists can promote/advertise on Apple music should Apple music gets more users onboard. Furthermore, Taylor Swift has successfully made a few music labels be more receptive towards Apple Music since Apple has promised to pay the musicians. Good relationships with the artists can even further suggest collaborations like music concerts, etc. Therefore, the revenue will come not just come from subscription, but also advertising and collaborations.

My Original Thoughts on Apple Music
When Apple Music first arrived, my first thought was - "Alright, Spotify is gonna die...". I was looking primarily from the competition perspective. I wasn't really thinking much about the UI/UX because as much as I have 3 Apple devices, I'm still not a user of Apple music. Lol. Too lazy to change.

• User base: Apple Music has the Apple branding and it will encourage a lot of Apple users to take up the platform since Apple gives 3 month free trial to users as well as some family bundle price. Essentially, the topic goes back to the Apple ecosystem. It wants to trap many people to be in the ecosystem so that everything can be synchronised nicely. 
• Company: Spotify is a startup. Apple is an established company. The amount of cash Apple hold is more than enough even if Apple music's fails (mind you, Apple's cash= $200 billion). Therefore, it is totally reasonable and worth it for Apple to take on this risk to expand their foray into music streaming. This means that Apple is willing and capable of compromising their profit margins to motivate user acquisitions. Once user is onboard, the trial 3 months is to get them be used to Apple Music and if user retention is successful after the trial period, they will be able to keep them in the Apple ecosystem and roll out more monetization features to make up the initial margin loss. Tough fight for Spotify who has been bleeding terribly.  

 On hindsight, after yesterday's presentations (and over the past few weeks of lessons and assignments), I think I have developed a more acute sense towards UI/UX. I have started to pay more attention to UI features like screen real estate usage, list of options from the dropdown bar, etc when I'm using my own apps. One very important thing that I've learnt is that, native apps are better because it is developed for the app's needs. Web ≠ iPhone ≠ iPad. Different sizes, different typing method, different experiences. So curating the app to the specific device matters. People use different devices for varying purposes.

On a side note, really thankful for Assignment 2 teammate Zheng Yi for tanking the presentation. Lost my voice on Sunday night when I was supposed to be presenting for the group on Monday..... :(

(4) Zendesk Sharing + Update on Assignment 1 & 2 + meow

**TLDR nvm! Scroll down to BONUS section for overwhelming cuteness!**

I have heard about Zopim and Zendesk way before Monday's class, but I never expected myself to be sitting in a talk by its founder. So I was really excited tbh. For some reason, when Bjorn started talking, my instinct told me that he's a business dude. Lol, I was right. All along, I was expecting CS3216 guests to be developers/CS background and all. So I was rather pleasantly surprised.

Growth hacking was something not too unfamiliar. Hmm, the way Bjorn pushed his apps up the ranking, may be a little debatable... But face it, that's how apps or things in general gain attention. If we look at our own behaviour, who would have scrolled all the way to, say the 200th app? We want those popular apps, and we are never gonna find new apps if it's not propped up. So I would say it's legit.

Wenxiang. Oh wow. This guy is pretty amazing. Hmmm, I might not have understood fully the technical difficulties he has gone through for Zopim. But from the entrepreneurship point of view, I see how difficult it is for him to accept the 2-3 years of uncertainty. No salary, No stable job, family pressure, etc... It's really tough. and one thing most important that I learnt was that, the originality of the idea is not exactly the most important thing. I always have this belief that for something to take off, it has to be innovative and so it can WOW the world. But live chat is NOT new at all. So it turns out, the winner is the one who can come out with the best of that idea and who has a bit of luck as well. I'm the kind who believes in everything we do, there's still this 10% luck factor that is beyond control.

A small observation...
I think many students (including myself) are constrained by the fact that if they gonna develop a B2B thing, it's difficult to find users (i.e businesses) to test it out and Bjorn's way do not work with B2B apps. Then students will start constraining themselves to do something related to school/younger people because it's easier to find users. That's really undesirable. There are already many apps out there that are serving the normal consumers. Enterprises today have recognised the efficiency of technologies and are more open to embrace them. There IS a gap to serve, and enterprises are the ones desperate for efficiency. Zopim is a real example. Looking forward to pitching party.

Assignment updates
Assignment 1:
Yesssss... We've narrowed down our scope! We have much more focus right now and we also found a way to serve those non-target audience. Hmm, I think only in Final Project then will the business part comes in more... So sometimes, I feel really sian that I can't help my coders. But alright, focus on UI/UX and testing! :D

Assignment 2:
Had a meeting with my team yesterday. We chose on Pinterest. I didn't know there's so much flaws in its UI/UX. My teammates were able to point out things that I myself didn't even notice. Learning from each other everyday! :)

**BONUS!!!**

Oh well, I know Colin reminded us that the blog should be relevant to class.... but whatever, seek forgiveness than permissions (Tan, Aug 2015) HAHA

I think Colin has some obsession over cats? OKAY I MEGA LOVE CATS TOO. I think nala is cute, but hmm, maybe too mainstream HAHA OOPS. Anyway, I think I follow more cats than humans on Instagram lol. Scottish fold is my favourite breed <3

For those who are interested, these are some of my favourite cats I absolutely love.
hmmm Maybe I should end off every post with a cat feature hahaha..

Roku, Scottish fold from Bangkok.

He is really famous. He endorsed Dyson fan in Thailand.

He has a wife (@hachithecat), 4 kids, and one of his kids is gonna be a mother soon!

Your mouse, my pillow ☺️

A photo posted by Roku Roku (@rokuthecat) on Jul 29, 2015 at 4:48am PDT 

march_2nd from Korea

This cat... has this attitude/forever-angry face, that's why I love it haha.

Its fur is really of TOP quality OMG. So smooth, I can't even...

에어컨 최최고 명당 으음 시원하구냥😪

A photo posted by 보리밭😺🌾 (@march_2nd) on Jul 23, 2015 at 8:32pm PDT

Albert, a munchkin from LA

It looks friggin like a TOY!

This is how we do. #sundaynight @petsmart✌ #petsmart #petsmartcart #weeklyfluff

A photo posted by Albert 🎩 (@albertbabycat) on Jul 26, 2015 at 5:48pm PDT

Dooboo (brown) and Tongki (grey), Korea
I watched tongki grew up, from a little kitten to now... a FAT cat haha.
Their interaction is really adorable! Dooboo is always bullying tongki when tongki was smaller haha.

- 누나헝아동생언니오빠이모땀츈들 굿나잇. #cat #윤두부 #윤통키 #두통남매 #두부왕통키 #왕만두같쟈나 #그래도구엽쟈나 #통키못생김주의 _

A photo posted by 조성아 (@dooboo_cat) on Mar 10, 2015 at 8:18am PDT

and how can I forget our local cats!
PANCAKE, munchkin from SINGAPORE!! *insert SG50 logo* lol
Pancake is like the cutest ever.
it's really a SG cat and it has the shortest legs and cutest paws ever haha

pancake in flattened mode is not so flat after all. #catkote #cats #catlovers #catsconnect #catstagram #catsoninstagram #catsofinstagram #catoftheday #kittygram #kittensoninstagram #kittensofinstagram #sgcats #pets #petlovers #pancake #petstagram #munchyneko #instacats #thedailykitten #instakotik #instagramcats #munchkincats #neko #ねこ #マンチカン #igcats #igpets #igdaily #picoftheday #submitcat

A photo posted by Pancake (@nugget_pancake) on Apr 26, 2015 at 7:58am PDT

Ciao

Mei Lan 

(3) SCRUM + Assignment 1

I really liked this week's class where Chris shared the tips about project management and introduction to agile and scrum. It got me thinking about user stories, something that my teammates also mentioned to me before. So after the talk, I wrote the user stories for our Assignment 1, and got feedback from my team that the expected outcome has be clearer than a generic one. Took in their advice and revised it~ yay

User stories

Oh, and Colin's talk on software development. On the part regarding the role of non-developers and developers. Now I think i have a better idea of how can I assist the group. Not just the marketing, but also to test out the apps. I now try to do abit of designing as well so that I can work on the UI/UX to improve the user's experience.

Update on the Assignment 1:
As of now, I'm fairly positive about it. I like the idea, and things are going well.
I wanted contribute more so I dabbled a little into design and that was pretty fun. (though it took me a while to figure out how to use sketch + get icons/resources+ how to make things nice). I also read up about UI/UX. I crafted out the mockups and flow of the app, from pages to pages, and I think it provides a good visualisation of our app. But while doing it, it sort of confirmed one of my concerns.

I feel that our app is bloating up. (see below.)

say hi to bloated fat cat meow~

Our app tries to do a lot. But what's holding me back is that I see the complete story of the app with these added features which are useful and justified. From a business standpoint, the idea will sell if the story is compelling. Furthermore, i see the developers of my team really want to make it work. But if you ask me, I still feel that such scale seems to be more suitable for the final project. We see how it goes, gonna have a meeting with my team tomorrow. For this project, I would say team's priority should be on the UI/UX than having more features, as reminded by Suyuen on Facebook.

Ciao

Mei Lan

(2) First week of CS3216

Three things happened over at CS3216.

(A) Show and Tell
I have to be honest-- I was MINDBLOWN! I have seen things I've never seen before, okay, especially that rubix cube which can changes shape with every twist. I was truly fascinated.
Anyway I really like seeing how everyone talks about the little thing they want to show and tell. The brimming passion and little nerdjoy spilling over sometimes... makes life seem a lot simpler. And I guess it reveals a bit of everyone's personality and it probably helps people in identifying people who they might be interested to work with for the projects.

(B) Saturday workshop
First class on more technical aspect of things. php and mySQL were fine. I actually appreciate that it was  condensed, since it's not as if php and mySQL can be learnt in 1.5 hours. Git got me a little confused at the start..... but I think I understand how it works. Like a programming dropbox kinda thing to collaborate. (Someone pls correct me if I'm wrong!)

(C) First project meeting
Pretty productive. Did brainstorming and kind of settled on the idea. But still, it's a very raw idea, my team do see some loopholes that is pretty tricky. Well, we will work it out.

Ciao
Mei Lan

(1) What do I hope to learn in CS3216

Well, being a business student with no programming background, it does sound insane to take this class. And honestly, I only heard of the CS3216 saga after I got the class. I applied purely because I want to. In simpler language, I applied this class without knowing that it is highly demanded, highly selective, and extremely difficult. *insert panic emoji*
Alright, here are some things that I hope to take away from CS3216.

(1) Programming skills

Oh well, this goes without saying. I will definitely be able (and need to) pick up some programming skills. Surely a good thing in this technological era. More than happy to learn it.

(2) Discover possibilities out there with programming

Precisely because I do not have programming background, I do not know what's technically possible with programming and what's not. We can always let our imaginations run wild and dream of super cool things that we want to create, but if it's technically impossible at this present day, it's still just an idea.

(3) Learning from others

This module requires a lot of working along with others. And from the pool of students taking this class, I understand that the diversity is quite huge. We will probably view issues from different angle and it's a good thing since we are developing something new. I think such interaction will give everyone valuable hindsight. Also, we probably will learn technical skills from each other as well.

Taking CS3216 means getting out of comfort, exploring something that I think is worth trying while I have the luxury of time as a student. I have always wanted to create something that will provide value for people, making daily lives better. Hope that while learning from all the other student developers and designers and tutors, they will also be able to benefit from my input as a business student about marketing ideas effectively.

Alright, let the (crazy) journey begin heh :P

Ciao

Mei Lan