(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