Right, now is the real catching up.
First up, the external pitching two weeks back. A couple of them left impressions in me, mainly 1) Dr. Dana's AED game, and 2) the candlestick thing.
I am not sure how many of us in the audience were interested in the candlestick thing he was talking about, because I have the impression that most of us sitting there have no interest in growing money. Or maybe its just me.
There were quite a few times I exited LT19 at night only to be greeted by formally dressed peers tucking into buffet, which was when I realised while I was inside LT19 for some geek event or lecture, some bank was holding some other event in the neighbouring LT17. I always find the scene hilarious, maybe because of the stark contrast between their attire and mine. Haha.
Maybe Gary Ong would have better chances talking to them.
Anyway I am a simple person; I'm not in the least bit interested in investments and stocks, at least not at this point of time. If I ever need some adrenaline from gambling, I prefer to dabble in the simplicities of 4D and Toto (Q: What is the probability of winning 4D? A: 50%. tio and bo tio).
On the other hand, I am very impressed by Dr Dana and his motivation to get people to be familiar with AEDs. In fact I think that his cause is so noble, a game seems too..insignificant? There should be better ways of spreading the use of AEDs around I guess.
Of course, not to say that games (or digital media in general) won't work, as can be seen in this case, but to create a good game that actually teaches will not be easy. Anyway games can only help so much.
******************************************
Last week there was the VSee talk. As the CEO, Milton, started talking about their collaborations with the US Navy Seals, immediately one question came up in my mind: During their strike on Osama in Pakistan which Obama and his aides observed real-time in the US, did the Navy Seals used VSee? I don't need an answer, but I won't be surprised if it was a yes.
On to what he said, he mentioned some very interesting points.
Be bored. I agree to a certain extent, because sometimes on my long MRT trips to school or to home, my mind will start to wander and I start thinking of random ideas and stuff. But that's not the only way either. Sometimes interacting with friends helps too.
Reply emails fast. Alright I'm guilty of that. Will take note of it and improve.
The Sandwich Method. I think this has been taught to us in secondary school. If my memory has not failed me, when we were taught how to write 公函, or official letters, during our Higher Chinese lessons, I remembered my teacher telling us, write something to praise the organization we are writing to first, then write our complaints/improvements/feedbacks/requests, and end off with a "Hope to hear from you soon!" Haha.
Break our patterns in our lives. Right I should try this too.
The one single thing that left a deep impression in me was not Milton's point actually, but Steve Jobs', which Milton highlighted. It was about Steve Jobs deciding to cancel his business meeting to have dinner with the girl he met after asking himself if he was going to die soon, which would he choose.
This is in line with one of his many quotes/philosophies:
".. almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
I should ask myself this more often. Maybe if I have started asking earlier, some things might have turned out differently.
Somehow the last bit of the talk became a little relationship consultation session, which was amusing haha. What I can say is that the dynamics of human relationships are complicated; its never good to be too demanding, but too much of "Yes Dear" and "I'm sorry" may not be good either. Its all about finding the right balance and compromise towards each other.
******************************************
Last Friday was pitching, and it seemed like many of us are jumping onto the gamification bandwagon. It remains to be seen how successful gamification techniques are; while there is JFDI Academy, there are also a million failures for every Facebook or Twitter.
Many people don't know how hard it is to drive taxis in Singapore. Sometimes its not that they want to avoid flag-down customers so they can earn that additional $2.50 booking fee (maybe some do *shrugs*), but when you have to pay $90+ taxi rental fee every day, and diesel costs, plus feed your family, sometimes you just want to earn as much as possible.
In any case, if anyone wants to work on taxi booking, a suggestion will be to work with the smaller companies; recently there was this news report quoting an expert saying that they should band together to develop an integrated taxi booking system, so as to compete with ComfortDelgro.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Case Study 1: Get Help
Oops I'm lagging behind. Time to catch up.
First of all, I thought the entire idea behind this application is quite good. Sometimes I myself need help with something but don't know who to turn to, or who in my friend list are subject matter experts in whatever I need.
Of course, one can easily solve this problem by posting a shout-out on his/her status. That's where the application comes in with the additional features that normal status posts don't offer:
1) An overview page to see all of one's friends requests for help. Many times when we look at our News Feed at the end of the day, we look at all sorts of updates from our friends, like photos, videos, links etc, and any friends requesting for help using statuses might get buried under this pile of less important stuff.
2) Celebrating the act of helping. While genuine friends typically don't ask for anything in return, I think its nice to get little rewards for help rendered, even if they are in the form of virtual badges or mere "Mr Good Samaritan" titles. Praises work wonders me thinks.
Usability vs Aesthetics
Not quite comfortable with writing this actually, because I'm no expert in UI and my team's Facebook assignment was whacked left right centre for the UI/UX. Never mind I shall just give some opinions.
I think the Home Page is probably the most important page in an application, since it is the first page that a user sees when he first comes in, and have the power to make a user happy, or piss him off rightaway. Therefore alot of consideration have to be put in when planning a Home Page (my Facebook team members tore our hair out, figuratively, planning the FrenFactory home page).
Get Help's Home Page is fine, but I find it only caters to people requesting for help. Sure they get things done right at the Home Page, but the other half of the target audience, ie the nice friends offering to help get left out. They have to click one more time to reach the Overview Page (using Prof Ben's 'number of clicks' theory), which isn't that bad actually, but the nice friends don't need the 'need quick help?' and 'Who do you want to ask?' sections.
A suggestion can be tocopy reference Facebook's current Home Page. The top section 'I need help with..' can stay at the top, with a 'More details' button linking to another page with the 'add more details' and 'Who do you want to ask?' sections. Thereafter, replace the huge body section with the Overview Page, ala Facebook News Feed. With this, those requesting for help can still get the bare minimum done, while the nice friends can see the feeds right after they entered the app. A little compromise for both parties.
The Overview Page looks fine to me, although I wonder how one can get to the Project Page from the Overview Page. Comparing both pages, I notice there are the 'Help him!' and the 'Refer a friend!' buttons on the Overview Page, but there is no 'Wish him luck!' button. I'm guessing that 'Wish him luck' will be a quick task of posting a good luck feed on that friend's wall, so perhaps it will be more appropriate to put that on the Overview Page rather than the 'Refer a friend'. Afterall, if you want to refer a friend A to your friend, you might first refer to the Project Page to see if that friend A is already helping him or not, right?
Freedom given to user when posting a need
I think the team has put in adequate effort in this area; users are given plenty of freedom in posting needs, like the ability to post needs via feeds, Twitter and even SMS. The 'Who do you want to ask?' section is quite complete too, and it even comes with the option to hide from specific friends! Details are comprehensive too, allowing users to insert deadlines, tags and locations. Overall it covers all the ground that I can think of. Haha.
Cycle of interaction and incentives
I'm not sure how the entire cycle works. What happens after a nice friend clicks 'Help her!'? Does a separate chat box comes up linking up both the friend and the poor soul, or are contact details exchanged?
Also, how are incentives given out? Are karma points added the moment a nice friend clicks 'Help her!'? If that is so, 'nice' friends can just go around clicking every single 'Help her!' button they see, no? Or can the person requesting for help give a rating of how much help the friends have rendered, which in turn affects the incentives the friends can get?
Not to mention, if a particular request for help is fulfilled, can the owner delete the request, to complete the entire 'cycle of interaction'? Can the owner post 'thank you' feeds on the walls of friends who have helped?
I like the whole casual take on the Statistics page, with the use of words like fire, hottest, networking gurus etc, and the giving out of virtual badges. As I mentioned earlier, genuine friends typically don't ask for anything in return, but these little incentives and rewards celebrate this whole act of helping and sit nicely in between "showing appreciation" and "don't mention it".
Other problems
I guess the main problem is already hinted in the preceding section, which is exactly how to help. Different kinds of requests require different kinds of help. Sometimes they are as simple as typing a few step-by-step instructions; other times various parties have to meet face-to-face for guidance and teaching. I guess not all help can be rendered through the app, but at least it offers a starting point.
Back during my National Service, there were those days we had to pack large numbers of stores into shipping containers as we prepared for Exercise Wallaby in Australia. I still recall the regulars who screamed at us telling us not to stand around but go and help. The problem is, there were already so many people crowding around at the opening of the container, what else can we do besides joining them and standing with them?
Sometimes, it is easy to open one's mouth and say, 'Go and help!' Its difficult to find the sweet spot between '帮不上忙' and '越帮越忙'.
First of all, I thought the entire idea behind this application is quite good. Sometimes I myself need help with something but don't know who to turn to, or who in my friend list are subject matter experts in whatever I need.
Of course, one can easily solve this problem by posting a shout-out on his/her status. That's where the application comes in with the additional features that normal status posts don't offer:
1) An overview page to see all of one's friends requests for help. Many times when we look at our News Feed at the end of the day, we look at all sorts of updates from our friends, like photos, videos, links etc, and any friends requesting for help using statuses might get buried under this pile of less important stuff.
2) Celebrating the act of helping. While genuine friends typically don't ask for anything in return, I think its nice to get little rewards for help rendered, even if they are in the form of virtual badges or mere "Mr Good Samaritan" titles. Praises work wonders me thinks.
Usability vs Aesthetics
Not quite comfortable with writing this actually, because I'm no expert in UI and my team's Facebook assignment was whacked left right centre for the UI/UX. Never mind I shall just give some opinions.
I think the Home Page is probably the most important page in an application, since it is the first page that a user sees when he first comes in, and have the power to make a user happy, or piss him off rightaway. Therefore alot of consideration have to be put in when planning a Home Page (my Facebook team members tore our hair out, figuratively, planning the FrenFactory home page).
Get Help's Home Page is fine, but I find it only caters to people requesting for help. Sure they get things done right at the Home Page, but the other half of the target audience, ie the nice friends offering to help get left out. They have to click one more time to reach the Overview Page (using Prof Ben's 'number of clicks' theory), which isn't that bad actually, but the nice friends don't need the 'need quick help?' and 'Who do you want to ask?' sections.
A suggestion can be to
The Overview Page looks fine to me, although I wonder how one can get to the Project Page from the Overview Page. Comparing both pages, I notice there are the 'Help him!' and the 'Refer a friend!' buttons on the Overview Page, but there is no 'Wish him luck!' button. I'm guessing that 'Wish him luck' will be a quick task of posting a good luck feed on that friend's wall, so perhaps it will be more appropriate to put that on the Overview Page rather than the 'Refer a friend'. Afterall, if you want to refer a friend A to your friend, you might first refer to the Project Page to see if that friend A is already helping him or not, right?
Freedom given to user when posting a need
I think the team has put in adequate effort in this area; users are given plenty of freedom in posting needs, like the ability to post needs via feeds, Twitter and even SMS. The 'Who do you want to ask?' section is quite complete too, and it even comes with the option to hide from specific friends! Details are comprehensive too, allowing users to insert deadlines, tags and locations. Overall it covers all the ground that I can think of. Haha.
Cycle of interaction and incentives
I'm not sure how the entire cycle works. What happens after a nice friend clicks 'Help her!'? Does a separate chat box comes up linking up both the friend and the poor soul, or are contact details exchanged?
Also, how are incentives given out? Are karma points added the moment a nice friend clicks 'Help her!'? If that is so, 'nice' friends can just go around clicking every single 'Help her!' button they see, no? Or can the person requesting for help give a rating of how much help the friends have rendered, which in turn affects the incentives the friends can get?
Not to mention, if a particular request for help is fulfilled, can the owner delete the request, to complete the entire 'cycle of interaction'? Can the owner post 'thank you' feeds on the walls of friends who have helped?
I like the whole casual take on the Statistics page, with the use of words like fire, hottest, networking gurus etc, and the giving out of virtual badges. As I mentioned earlier, genuine friends typically don't ask for anything in return, but these little incentives and rewards celebrate this whole act of helping and sit nicely in between "showing appreciation" and "don't mention it".
Other problems
I guess the main problem is already hinted in the preceding section, which is exactly how to help. Different kinds of requests require different kinds of help. Sometimes they are as simple as typing a few step-by-step instructions; other times various parties have to meet face-to-face for guidance and teaching. I guess not all help can be rendered through the app, but at least it offers a starting point.
Back during my National Service, there were those days we had to pack large numbers of stores into shipping containers as we prepared for Exercise Wallaby in Australia. I still recall the regulars who screamed at us telling us not to stand around but go and help. The problem is, there were already so many people crowding around at the opening of the container, what else can we do besides joining them and standing with them?
Sometimes, it is easy to open one's mouth and say, 'Go and help!' Its difficult to find the sweet spot between '帮不上忙' and '越帮越忙'.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
calm before the storm
Wow new (Blogger) look. Hope things don't get screwed up.
Its the start of a new week after driving ourselves nuts over the past three weeks with the Facebook app and the seminar.
Having read some comments about PDF Expert, the app that my team presented, I agree with them. In all honesty, I myself will not fork out $9.99 for an app when many free apps can do roughly what PDF Expert alone can do (Although now that I have it *ahem* in my iPad, I like it for the convenience of being able to retrieve documents from Sugarsync and opening them, all under one roof).
I guess from developers' point of view, sometimes we want to create apps that have as many features as possible, in order to distinguish ourselves from the competition. I mean, if we create apps that do the exact same things as other apps, why create them in the first place? Unfortunately in the process, developers tend to scale the cost up proportionally to justify what they have done, forgetting that from the consumers' point of view, all we want are just stable apps that do what we want correctly, at the lowest cost possible (suddenly the $99 HP Touchpad came into my mind).
Oh yes, today I just realised that PDF Expert can unzip zipped files too, into a nice neat folder for you to browse the documents inside. But I digress.
Therefore, as developers, sometimes we need to answer difficult questions like how far we should go in adding value to our apps, potentially locking out a majority of customers, or keeping costs low but struggle from slim profit margins. Thinking back, I should have mentioned during the presentation that they can increase their commercial potential by selling a scaled down version of PDF Expert at a lower price. Might earn them more money, I don't know.
On a sidenote, I have always preferred reading hard copies; reading off screens for too long tire my eyes. Ironically, the ease of access of reading material through the iPad has resulted in me reading more these days. My guess is that tablets are not going to replace books anytime soon, but as technology continues to improve, the day will come where screens can reproduce text better than printers. Books might just die out then.
Finally our Facebook app assignment is done. This part of the journey had not been easy; we were constantly changing everything that can be changed; coding, schema, UI, game mechanics. Overall, I think our entire team was quite new and inexperienced in terms of the tasks we had to do; software engineering for ZW and MT, design for YH and project management for me. That is, on top of the new stuff that we have never handled before, like the Facebook platform, jQuery, AJAX etc.
Lack of experience aside, the team was a joy to work with. We worked hard, but amidst the heavy workload, we found time to joke and make fun of each other, which I have always personally maintained to be very important as it keeps team morale high. To finally be able to put up something to show, even though it wasn't well polished, was an accomplishment for all of us I guess. Hopefully everyone have picked up some lessons through our assignment (MT mentioned he learnt alot from my code. I don't think I write very good code; hope he doesn't pick up the wrong stuff :/)
Having hung around with some of the brilliant minds for a long time, there is the lingering pressure for me to at least not be too far from them. Because of this I think I have become a little critical of myself over time, constantly questioning and rejecting ideas that I think will not match up to their standards of 'good'. As a couple of my friends gave approving comments for FrenFactory, I heave a sigh of relief.
Hope they were not smoking me. Haha.
Its the start of a new week after driving ourselves nuts over the past three weeks with the Facebook app and the seminar.
Having read some comments about PDF Expert, the app that my team presented, I agree with them. In all honesty, I myself will not fork out $9.99 for an app when many free apps can do roughly what PDF Expert alone can do (Although now that I have it *ahem* in my iPad, I like it for the convenience of being able to retrieve documents from Sugarsync and opening them, all under one roof).
I guess from developers' point of view, sometimes we want to create apps that have as many features as possible, in order to distinguish ourselves from the competition. I mean, if we create apps that do the exact same things as other apps, why create them in the first place? Unfortunately in the process, developers tend to scale the cost up proportionally to justify what they have done, forgetting that from the consumers' point of view, all we want are just stable apps that do what we want correctly, at the lowest cost possible (suddenly the $99 HP Touchpad came into my mind).
Oh yes, today I just realised that PDF Expert can unzip zipped files too, into a nice neat folder for you to browse the documents inside. But I digress.
Therefore, as developers, sometimes we need to answer difficult questions like how far we should go in adding value to our apps, potentially locking out a majority of customers, or keeping costs low but struggle from slim profit margins. Thinking back, I should have mentioned during the presentation that they can increase their commercial potential by selling a scaled down version of PDF Expert at a lower price. Might earn them more money, I don't know.
On a sidenote, I have always preferred reading hard copies; reading off screens for too long tire my eyes. Ironically, the ease of access of reading material through the iPad has resulted in me reading more these days. My guess is that tablets are not going to replace books anytime soon, but as technology continues to improve, the day will come where screens can reproduce text better than printers. Books might just die out then.
Finally our Facebook app assignment is done. This part of the journey had not been easy; we were constantly changing everything that can be changed; coding, schema, UI, game mechanics. Overall, I think our entire team was quite new and inexperienced in terms of the tasks we had to do; software engineering for ZW and MT, design for YH and project management for me. That is, on top of the new stuff that we have never handled before, like the Facebook platform, jQuery, AJAX etc.
Lack of experience aside, the team was a joy to work with. We worked hard, but amidst the heavy workload, we found time to joke and make fun of each other, which I have always personally maintained to be very important as it keeps team morale high. To finally be able to put up something to show, even though it wasn't well polished, was an accomplishment for all of us I guess. Hopefully everyone have picked up some lessons through our assignment (MT mentioned he learnt alot from my code. I don't think I write very good code; hope he doesn't pick up the wrong stuff :/)
Having hung around with some of the brilliant minds for a long time, there is the lingering pressure for me to at least not be too far from them. Because of this I think I have become a little critical of myself over time, constantly questioning and rejecting ideas that I think will not match up to their standards of 'good'. As a couple of my friends gave approving comments for FrenFactory, I heave a sigh of relief.
Hope they were not smoking me. Haha.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)