Help! Need help!

... about get help! lol

Well, time to do assignment.

Let's go through each of the screenshoot

Good thing first, the upper menu looks quite nice in term of aesthetics. 

But why are you in profile? And the homepage is loaded with too many options: privacy (all friends, white-list some specific ones, black-list some), method to send the help (RSS, Twitter, SMS), and more detailed help!

- Privacy options are too verbose, it can be done better by some icons to demonstrate the meaning. When the user hover over the icon, he can read the detailed description of these options

- Twitter and sms are very unnecessary and extra options, shouldn't be shown to user directly like this.

- Detailed request should be put as an optional link (like google calendar) in the main, short request bar above.

So most of the parts of the home page are not very functional.

The homepage is the page users see whenever visiting the app, and most likely the only page users see, so we want to be sure it loads with the most important information, the information that define the app. Here it is help requests: your own requests (of course you want to know the response / progress the most right?) and friends' request (if it's pump into your face that your friends need help, you will pay more attention!). So these requests should be shown in the home page! 

That's the overview page! They should've combined the two pages. (That's what facebook does: show you your friends' newest feed in the homepage, yet allow you to write new status in the same page)

Quick comment on two other pages. Will come back with more detailed comments.

This page look the best so far. The wall / chat room is nice. The 3 icons (refer friends, help and wish luck) looks attractive. Thats good.

I dont understand the bar on the right though. 1 is helpers: 9 souls have offered their hand. Soul? it doesn't sound fun! kind of revered thing? and why are the icons repeated (lol)

Probables is kind of complicated words, should choose a simpler one. Hmm, chances doesn't seem right. But the upper one called helpers, why doesn't this one called referees? friends referred?

Statistics page looks good, but it should show something more encouraging to the users first, like his own statistic and achievement, badges, etc.

Late than not! External pitching session!

No matter how many times Kah Hong asked me if I have blogged about this session, I had been trying to defer it. Honestly I didn't find much interesting points (to me) to blog about. Let's go through what happened that night!

The first pitch was about World Cities Summit. Basically that they want to make a simulation game in Facebook that is similar to SimCity, address some real issues and difficulties that the planners might face when managing a real city. Not only so, they want to raise the awareness of public about condition / requirement of a livable city/ a good city to live (well, you have to take a good care of your city so you should know what's good and bad for your own, real city!) I think it's promising to be popular in facebook! Where any kind of simulation game is popular =.= No one in the class showed any interest though. Someone said it was a government project so..

The second pitch is from a guy from Microsoft talking about data servicing. It was like a mess; only until he finished his talk I had some idea of what he wanted to say. Well, maybe it was because of all the troubles he faced during his talk (network connection, etc.) I think he went off topic quite a lot: began the talk by talking about data and how data could be processed, etc, while what he wanted to say is that he got some good data that can sell to us. Well, I had a little idea about what his data can be used for. How do you guys think?

The similar idea with that (in term that they provide us some service), but in different presentation way, is the pitch from iSyndica. Their talk was much more open and direct than the one I mentioned above. They had a platform to store, share, distribute media products like photos, videos in various (social) network like picasa, flickr, youtube(?), facebook, .. They had created the API to their platform already and now ready to give it away for us to use. And everything is free! The first thing I thought about was Treehouse project by Cedric, Andy & Adhiraj,. (as they wanted to pursue it to final project) So far I didn't see any prominent different of their app with other better communication way. If they could make use of iSyndica to provide more video features (like offline video message) it might be cool!

Next I will talk shortly about Module Review. The talk focused totally on module review, and nothing related to us! What did the speaker want from us? He didn't say a word of it. To speak of module review, I think it's kind of a wiki page for modules in NUS right? Why dont we create a wiki page called NUSWiki or so, so that people can update all information about NUS?

Redsport also spent quite an amount of time to talk about what it is doing and only talked about what it wanted from us in the last few minutes of the talk. Quick thought about this I think Kah Hong and his sgBEAT might work well with them in term of providing / updating result in time and easily (via sms). I was in charge of Temasek IHG (Interhall game) website and I also thought about this once. Like the speaker said, what matter the most, what needed the most on sport are results of the games. So this method might be a boost for both parties. Bringing Redsport into facebook, so far I can only think of making comment / discuss in Redsport easier (via facebook connect). Sharing the posts? I think it wouldn't really work. But well, having 1 more button might boost people to click. Another idea is giving feed (of new result, new posts) via facebook (fan page?).

Little to say about 6Wave. It was a kind of detailed lesson on making money from social network game! They were professional and that's the point! What they wanted to say is if you have a good app/ good idea, come to us, we are pro, we can help you promote your app and we can share profit!

Prince of Persia is the most realistic project in the pitching. It's something big! something real! something that is running! Quite a good chance for those who are interested in game development. To talk about that, when I came back, I actually tried ExplosiveBarrel's games, and I must say their game are of high quality! Try Strawhat samurai! Their newest game is kind of messy though: you have to control 3 character of different abilities at the same time! But other stuff like graphic, game design are very professional.

SuperPoke

The presentations last night were all of *high quality* . Every group did a very good job at analyzing applications and presenting their ideas. Some presentations were quite amusing, some introduces new ideas, most invoked some thoughts in my mind. After the class, I felt quite refreshing in the mind. Thanks all = )

Now is about the SuperPoke presentation:

All I could remember now is that Instead of focusing on the application's functionality, which is quite simple, Tomithy's group focused more on how to improve it and suggested to use it in Poke 'Causes'. *Tomithy throws you a Haiti earthquake, throw back?* - Jonathan. Haha. Amusing. I wasn't very clear how they wanted to implement it, how it was different from the way people are spreading the message of helping Haiti now in facebook. Besides, they did mention that SuperPoke is kind of superficial, yet they want to use it this way. Moreover, I think the way superpoke and similar application can gain popularity is different from 'Causes', which people spread by the content of the message. Below paragraph is my explanation of superpoke and friends' popularity.

In my opinion, this kind of application can be viral is normally used to gain attention and relieve boredom (see definition below). Bored? Click, click, click. Want to reconnect with some old friends but dont have a good reason or a good message? Click, click, click. That way some simple, (might be) amusing message with YOUR NAME in it will be displayed in YOUR FRIEND's wall. I dont think many people will actually respond to these poke by another poke, but definitely will have to pay a little attention to the person who poked you.

Poke

• An action of tapping and/or softly jabbing another person using a finger, stick, or similar object to gain their attention, relieve boredom or just to be annoying.

Some comments on their presentation:

- Nice slideshow, nice effect.

- Though the way the application works is quite simple or similar to Pillow Fight, they should at least state it at first.

- 1 small note: the sentence "Prof Ben throw assignment to you, throw back?" was a waste that it wasn't "thrown" but "written" there.

- At some moment prof Ben suggest presenters can have someone else moving the slide for them. I comment to Ji Wei that it won't work. We can see it clearly in Tomithy's presentation. It was disrupted several times when Chuan Yeong moves the slides too fast or too slow, and Tomithy had to stop to tell Chuan Yeong to move it as he wanted. That is because it is very hard for the one who control the slides to understand the presenter's idea and need. Discordance can affect the presentation quite a lot. I think the best way is to have a remote control so that you can freely control the slides by yourself. That way you will not having to stick with the computer or explicitly tell another person to control the slides as wished.

About other groups:


- There was a remarkable idea many groups stated, that is redesign the applications GUI, remove ads or move it to a less remarkable position. However, I wonder if they thought it will affect the money earned by the application? For example, Pillow Fight put a lot of ads everywhere, overlap each other is because it wants to attract people most attention to these ads, and sometimes you might accidentally click on ads instead of other buttons. That makes money. Texas Hold'em Poker put the invitation right in the middle of the screen so that people will have to pay attention to it, and either cancel or fill it, but cannot ignore it. Sometimes it fails, sometimes it helps raising new users.

Com'on, they don't care if the application is popular or not, if the users' experience is the best or not, they only care how to make the most money.

So there is a trade off here: you can put more ads, more distracting pop-up to gain more money, but at the same time you have to face the fact that users will find it irritating and quit the application. It is like an upside down parabol: no ads many user yet no money, too much ads no user and thus no money, the extreme is somewhere in between: some ads, some users. So the best way to do here is trial and error: they as developers can put more ads, see how users react (number of user left, etc.) to adjust the number of app. If many people drop by adding 1 ads, they will remove it. If users hardly complain about the ads' appearance, they will keep it. That's it. I suspect these application has done that thousands time (especially application with many games like Zynga) to achieve the optimized scheme for these things.