Strengthen Yourself by Ideas
Thursday 7 February 2013
about TEAMMATES
http://teammatesv4.appspot.com
This is the open source project currently I am involved in -- TEAMMATES. TEAMMATES is a free peer evaluation and peer feedback system for student teams available online. Having been a contributor for about 4 weeks, I feel that it is always not easy to measure the issues as well as improve the product in the real life. Before you hand on to do coding or debugging or something else related to source code itself, you need to think seriously to balance the tradeoff among series of suggestions. This is what I realize to be essential to learn and I will do my best to make it.
Saturday 13 October 2012
What Is Knowledge?
I still remember that in the lecture of
this week, one speaker a question: what things you consider as knowledge? That
is actually quite interesting and inspirational for us to know what kind of altitude
we should have towards learning.
In
our normal understandings, knowledge mostly means the skills especially
technical skills. For example, before we enter the university, all the information
we acquired in the class were thought as knowledge. As a result, the course
grade we got was treated as the standard to judge how rich your knowledge was.
But as we have learnt so many different kinds of things after we entered the
university, the scope of knowledge is no longer as narrow as we thought before.
Communication skills, self-study ability, project management skills and even
the principles in life are all the knowledge you cannot learn from lecture,
tutorial or workshop but they are proved to be quite essential. In this case,
knowledge is more about your understandings for several aspects of the world
other than the useless calculation skills or business cases you learn in the
textbooks in order to get higher grade or gain more money.
For the experience I gain so far from CS3216, I indeed have the feeling
that knowledge is not restricted to what we can learn from lectures, tutorial
sheets, online documentation content or experience shared by skillful seniors.
When I do front-end design, design for UI and UX is not the mechanized and tedious
coding work but really depends on your life experience, your arts connoisseurship
and even your personalities. Good arts connoisseurship results in harmonious UI
structuring splendid UI appearance and life experience and your personalities
decide whether you can provide the results that users really want under their
oral requirements for you. Steve Jobs said that when users propose the
requirements for the products, in most case they won’t correctly deliver their
desires and that is your responsibility to figure out what are hidden under the
surface. Therefore, this design for UX requires a lot on your comprehensive
abilities or in another word, knowledge. That’s why we can see that the persons
who design the most excellent front-end are not just experts in computer
technology but also out-standing in many areas which may seems not to be
relevant with design.
Live
and learn. That is not just a good learning attitude. Moreover, it tells us
that knowledge exist in almost everywhere in our lives. Living and learning
help us discover the knowledge hidden inside lives and that probably will be
more important and valuable than what we gain from standard textbooks and trainings.
Wednesday 3 October 2012
Plan Well before Your Start Working
For
what Lanh had said, I cannot agree more because it is just like that the idea
is your blueprint of building and the techniques you master now is the base of
your building. How can the building be if you cannot build a reliable base even
you have a great blueprint? Then, for the question that whether the idea is
important or the execution is important, I have to say this should not be a
question because obviously both are important because a good application is always
with a good innovation idea and well-handled execution. These two points happen
in different phases of application development and they should be given enough
attention in each phase.
For
Facebook, what I want to say is the success it has done recently for the
transfer of technical focus from HTML5 to native mobile apps. No matter whether
this decision is correct or not, the improvements of the performance are quite obviously
and falling condition of its share price has been reversed. This gives us a convictive
lesson on how should we make good decisions in proper time.
For
Another life, actually this idea went to the wrong way at the very beginning
because the team came up with this idea even without seriously thinking clearly
about the logic flow and values users can gain from. For fan Gang, actually it
is not a bad idea to start from because the logic and usage of this idea is
quite clear and straightforward.
For
the decision of whether change project idea or not in the mid-way, my opinion
is that the general cost of both decisions should be measured and considered according
to the remaining time firstly. In this phase, since the original idea was
almost impossible to be well implemented on time, the team should decisively
make the decision early to change to measurable ideas.
After reading through the whole case, in my point of view, there are two
major problems for the team. First, they did not evaluate the time required for
developing the whole application in the early stage of their project. Second,
they kept planning for too many features for each idea they chose to work on
without clear understanding of the core features of each. For non-obvious
problem, they lacked a decisive decision maker with clear understanding about
the whole working logic of each idea.
They actively met up to discuss about what problems would be faced and
gained feedbacks from others. These were what they did well.
If
I was Jeremy on the evening of 24th April, I will try my best to
call for all my members lastly to cut down all unnecessary components of our
applications to ensure the core functions at least work in some extent. Otherwise,
I had to tell Dr. Colin about the situations of my group and waited for his
suggestions.
If
one of me team members is unable to deliver, the whole working plan may be
changed to be a bit tightly. Besides, I should ask for each member about any
further issues they may face in the future which will probably affect the
progress of our project and plan well based on these details.
The
key point I learn from the case study is: Plan well before your start working.
This is actually a quite common sense but it is always ignored when we start an
exciting project. Here planning well does not mean to consider every detail.
This will lose the flexibility and probably be useless as things always change
as time goes on. Instead of caring much about details, the most important
things are the clear logic and understanding of project idea and the techniques
and time cost evaluation. These points are the fundamental factors for the application
development. If they are not carefully considered firstly, probably what happened
to Jeremy will happen for you.
Analyze For the Improvements of GetHelp!
As what have
been mentioned in the excerpt of the report for GetHelp! , the developers have
done a lot of improvements in UI design after receiving feedbacks from actual
users. To summarize the core point, the mainly point they captured and applied
in their improvements finally is to make the app more intuitive and concise.
This is quite important for a UI designer when he/she organizes the work flow
and functionalities of each page of the web app and actually it is still
popular and qualified to be a design rule for web app developers. Therefore,
besides the changes had been done for the home page of GetHelp!, actually this
rule can be applied to all the other pages. For examples, for statistics page,
the display of listing all kinds of statistics down in the page with just text
description is quite unintuitive and boring. To improve it, some images which
can briefly indicate the content of each statistics can be attached with each
statistics and after users enter this page, the images will directly give them
a general impression on what does each do. This also makes the page more
interactive and easy to use. Additionally, for the project page, there is a
decision problem on how you should organize the positions of reply box and the
answers list. For part of the users who decide to do a help, they probably want
to first have a look at other responses and come up with their own answer then.
So in this case if we can put the reply box in balanced position with answers
list instead of positioning reply box just in front of the answers list, this
will not affect the browser experience of both the viewers and users who just
want to reply first.
Furthermore, as mobile app is so popular now
that almost all the traditional websites or web apps are willing to make a
mobile version of them, the issues remaining are how to transform GetHelp! into
the mobile version. Actually, the answer is quite straightforward: Choose all
the essential components in the app and reorganize them to fit the size of
mobile phones. I found that the work flow of GetHelp! is quite like Facebook.
They both base on an asking and replying mechanism. So here, a possible way of
doing transforming is following the style of Facebook mobile app. In details,
one page for making a new project, one page for overviewing the helps list, one
page to show the answers list and give reply box and one page for viewing the
statistic list. However, in this case, because of the restriction of the screen
size of mobile phones, it’s inevitable to split the functions in each web page
into several pages on mobile phones. So another important point is the navigation
functions for all these pages. One good example is the structure of Facebook
mobile app, which provides a navigation page and also navigation bar in each
page. This helps user to follow the work flow of the app with a good user
experience.
Saturday 22 September 2012
Cloud is Accelerating the World
In the guest lecture
of this week, one guest from Amazon gave us some brief introduction about their
cloud services and some successful start-up examples powered by Amazon EC2
services such as DropBox and Instagram. Besides his detailed explanations and
suggestions about startup work flow emphasizing on business model (actually I
did not quite get all the content because business model really requires some
background knowledge…. :P), I did some deep thinking about the cloud service.
Cloud computing
is really not a fresh topic in recent years, even though most of the people
probably do not understand what it is. While indeed it is influencing our lives
more and more without our awareness. Amazon may not be the first one to push
out this service. But it is qualified to be treated as the pioneer of cloud
service. Under the pressure of Amazon on pushing cloud service intensively, great
IT companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have deployed their own cloud services
respectively. Therefore, now we can automatically get the PDF files, the
videos, the bookmarks and so on from any others devices which support the same
cloud. These benefits really leave a deep impression for people on cloud
service but they are far from the whole meanings of cloud.
As I know, Cloud
computing is a new kind of interactions relations among numbers of clients and
servers. In the past, the client side could just passively receive the content
sent by server without any customizing ability. As time goes on, the positions
of client and server become more and more balanced by the increasing technical improvements
of browsers. While for cloud, I will say it does emphasize more on client side,
which means that client own more power to control and customize the whole work
flow in the internet interactions and services. Furthermore, cloud enables
users to “move” the tough computing work to cloud side, which owns huge
computing power. In this case, user own huge computing resource by just a bit
cost to enable them carry out much more large-scale business without deploying
too many hardware facilities. That is what Instagram and DropBox applied
successfully and how Amazon EC2, S3, etc. and many other cloud services gain
profits. So with the development of cloud service, the structure and strategies
of many companies especially IT companies has changed greatly and start-up
becomes more and more popular as the investment requirements become much lower.
Therefore, no
matter in industry area or society area, cloud has proved itself to be a
significant role in current age. It makes a person to be much more “powerful”. It
is accelerating the development of the World.
Wednesday 12 September 2012
Create Value, Not Just Create Apps
For the lecture of this week, we have met a
lot of entrepreneurs (or guys just needing some technical assistance), who came
with various project topics from sports, home communication to E-commerce and English
education. Besides a lot of projects I was interested in, what I realized to be
worth sharing is how we should consider when we build apps. Just in purpose of
creating a cool app or creating value for users or even yourself by the app.
As
what the situation showed in the pitching session, web apps have been widely
accepted and used in many real life areas. Therefore, apps are not long the “toys”
for developers to play with but an industrial style to bring values for people’s
lives, business production efficiency, etc. In this case, caring more about the
product positioning and user experience of the app are much more important and
necessary than before. Only after users can gain values from your app can it be
called as a real “app”. That is also why our lecture Colin emphasized once and
once again that before you started creating your app, thought carefully on the
your whole workflow including the purpose of your app, your target users and
the best design plan fitting them.
Furthermore,
as we know, the age that any app you build will probably be popular has gone. That
is when apps tended to be quite a few about users were just of high interest
about this kind of mobile experience. However, now there are about 800 thousand
apps in Apple app store. Intensive competition forces us to think more about
the usability and user experience of app, which is user-centralized. So in this
case, to create value becomes a new standard principle to judge the success of
an app. For example, Flipboard turns out to be quite a successful app. Not only
its excellent user interface design, but also its integration of social
networking and News media create sufficient value for users to give much more
convenience for users to read news and posts. That is a significant point for
the success of Flipboard, which is sustainable.
All
in all, apps now have been categorized detailedly to fulfill the needs of
different areas. In this case the value goal is sort of easier to settle down
we developer has a clear idea about what they want to create. But application
homogenization makes it much harder to stand out from the “sea” of apps. Here
the one that thinks more about how to create value for users will probably win
finally. Therefore, hope in following web development, we can think more about
that instead of blindly playing inside ours own colorful word while ignoring
the actual value brought to users.
Monday 3 September 2012
Innovate From Life(team 5 presentation review)
For
the presentation of Flipboard, all in all I think the following three points
should be important to mention:
1. Mind
about details. This is the most impressive point I got from the presentation.
The choice of font style and color makes it quite nature to view the content of
the app as if it is a really magazine. And the particular interface design on mobile
phone really improves the user experience a lot. This is not also what good
design talks to, but also a sort of idea that will be delivered to all the users,
which is: the developer care about their feelings. This will definitely win the
users hearts and keep them around the app, which is what Flipboard owns now.
2. Accept
users from multiple contexts. So unlike twitter, Facebook or some News apps,
which focus on either social networking or News publishing, Flipboard uses its
RSS function to integrate social networking with News publishment and present
with their wonderful designed GUI. This is really a way of innovation. As a
result, users from both sides will be attractive and this is quite beneficial for
rapid expansion of the scale of the app.
3. Last
point I will emphasize on one bad point of Flipboard, which is not caching
enough content. For this sort of app which requires online remote update
access, caching is always a good and necessary way to enhance the user
experience, as offline cases will be more or less inevitable for users. So this
is really a necessary point for Flipboard to improve.
Flipboard,
as the presenter had said, is nothing new. The successful point of it is
re-innovating from exist industry models. Here are two points. First is what I
have mentioned in point 2 above. Integration of social networking and News
publishment really makes Flipboard stand out of others. This is a good model
for seeking new ways to innovate. Second is what I observe from many apps. As
we know , the growth of IT industry is mostly rely on the trend that IT
technologies are more and more used and in people’s normal lives and influence the
people’s living styles. Typically example is the popularity of ebooks. This is
actually nothing new, but just free book readers from carrying heavy books and read
on device conveniently without losing much reading experience. So does what Flipboard
has done. It is just nothing new but “moving” magazines from really one into
electronic style, which may reduce some reading experience, but with much
faster browsing and updating speed and relative low cost. This is really a kind
of good innovation strategy, which is what I mean by the title of this blog. In
the future, I believe this will be proved to be effective by many new apps or
services.
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