Notes and thinking of this week

About the buttons in GetHelp!

Current layout:

  Refer a friend, Help Her!, Wish her Luck

Should change to:

  Wish her Luck, Refer a friend, Help Her!

  So the last thing they see is Help her!, they are more likely to click ­that last button.

• The last thing or first thing people see have more impact

Incentives, how to engage people?

• Encourage competition, e.g. rankings
• Give space for growing, e.g. “level up”
• Encourage communications among users, “spread the virus”

How to know what your users do?

• Google Analytics
• Deliver different interface to users for A-B testing

Collaboration between programmer & designer

• Click-flow diagram
• Make the tree shallow, to minimize number of clicks
• Mockup
• Reason
• It’s easy to follow, not thinking about the interface every time

Team dynamics

Idea vs. Team?

• Team mates should believe in the idea, otherwise, it’s hard to work hard together
• Team mates should be easy-going, otherwise, hard to work together
• It’s hard to come up with an entire new idea, most of the time, ideas are similar, it’s the people who develop that out

Empathize vs. Escalate?

• What if we cannot make it?
• Be pessimistic
• Plan carefully, set out more ­­check-out point to supervise the entire process
• Back-up plans, do the important things fir st
• Try to understand your friends,
• What they can do
• Their personalities
• When problem happens, maybe solve it with your friends
• Questions I come up with:
• Do you like to code alone?
• How often should we meet?
• What problem have you met recently, how do you solve it?
• What have you learnt?

Case Study: GetHelp!

Usability vs. Aesthetics

Problem:

• Header is not very consistent, “Overview” and “Badges” have different ways of displaying.
• Home page, “call for help!” button should be put after all the details; currently, it feels that the detail and question are separated.
• Home page is for posting new questions
• I agree home page should be used to do stuff, not only listing links
• It can be used to ask question; alternatively, it can be used to see others’ questions
• Overview page, “help him” & “Refer to a friend” buttons are too big with little information.
• Under project Page,
• [Bug] There are repeated “helpers” and “probables”.
• The design for “comment display” section is loose; “who wrote at which time” occupies two lines. But these meta-data is not important, I prefer the facebook way, compact and clear.
• I wonder what will happen after clicking “help her!”, any commitment? Any jobs? Or any more interaction?
• Displaying referred people under “probables” doesn’t quite make sense, since referred people has the same possibility to become a helper as everybody who can see this page, if we display them, we should display everybody.

Number of options given to user when posting a need

Rationale:

• Ask people who knows me
• Most of the details are optional
• Get them interested in the first place, then provide more information later on.
• Potential problem: if no enough information provided, people may not interested enough to ask more questions

Cycle of interaction & incentives

Problem:

• Incentive:
• The incentives are badges and higher ranking; not very attractive to me, after all, they cannot buy me a drink.
• We can only see the best, not the whole ranking list, so I cannot know my own ranking, which should be used to encourage involvement.
• I think the problem for the incentives is “there is reputation, but no privilege”.
• Interaction:
• The main interaction is the comments section under project page, it allows help-seeker to communicate with potential helpers
• But there is no interaction between help-seeker and those real helpers, this is essential to get the job done eventually.

Some thoughts on VNC Viewer for iPad

Why do we need it? When do we need it?

-          It is used to control laptop, desktop remotely.

-          We need VNC because we don’t want to bring our laptop, desktop everywhere, while we still want to do something with software installed on it (like games) , or files inside it.

-          We need VNC because sometimes it may be more efficient to use touch-screen (with iPad) than mouse (with PC) for jobs like Photoshop, etc.

Because of Virtual Network Computing, you can do things on your computer anywhere, anytime you like. It is portable and convenient.

How does an app like VNC stand out of its competitors:

User experience:

-          Low latency (most important), control should be smooth

-          High image quality

-          Easy configuration

-          Supports as many operating systems as possible

-          Secure, your computer cannot be controlled by other people’s iPad

Technology:

         Core technology is about low latency and high image quality, which consists of:

-          Collects only the necessary data from operating system, e.g. standard output

-          Compress data, like Youtube, different resolution under different network condition; Data compression can be tricky since human eyes have different perception to different color, for some color, even we lose it, we may not notice it, which can be a way to compress data, besides the pure bit-level compression

-          Since desktop and iPad need to communicate through internet, maybe the company should invest money on ISP to ensure a better internet speed

Pricing strategy:

         In my view, the best pricing strategy will first lure users to give a try, then make them adapted to it, when users feel they cannot live without it, they begin to charge more. Based on this, the pricing strategy can be:

-          Trial version for 30 days

-          Charging at different price based on user’s requirement on latency and image quality

Overview:

         Unlike games are competing design and creativity , VNC and similar apps are competing their technologies, which is relatively straightforward. Furthermore, since this app has a high demand on internet speed, I think this market is still waiting for improved network technology to become really popular.

Being a follower

1.       People wants to be lone nut, they all know when it comes to success, leader is the only person to be remembered. Followers are nothing.

2.       Gold, silver, bronze, how different are they? But stories, reports, celebrations are only for champions.

3.       As told in the video, "first follower is an underestimated form of leadership"; it takes intelligence and courage. Intelligence (or foresight) to know what is cool, and courage to stand out and show your support. It is hard to adhere to your own point of view, especially when few people are on your side.

4.       If you are good at being the first follower, good at finding out unusualness from something crazy or something new, you can be a famous angel investor, you can even be the next Warren Buffett.

5.       And the fact is, the first may not be the best, followers can do better than pioneer.

a)         Before Google, Yahoo! already got search engine. Following Google’s success, Robin Li founded Baidu, which occupies 80% share of search market in China.

b)         Don’t underestimate followers, you never know Google+ will beat Facebook someday J

c)         When talking about start-ups, it’s not only about new idea; same idea can be developed differently, e.g. e-business is a simple idea, which can be developed into B2C, B2B, C2C with different business modals, this is to say, you can do things similar to what people have done before, but you need to do it in a different way.

6.       Consumers / audience are generally blind, this is where publicity and marketing comes. The dancing looks stupid to me, it seems marketing and publicity works quite well.

Ideas about life

1. I am not interested in making a great first impression, especially for those we will meet and hang out very often.
For them, first impression is usually not important;
good impression will let others expect more, if somehow you don't reach their expectation, you will disappoint them in the end;
if you leave them a normal impression at the first time and do some excellent job in the end, you will surprise them and earn their trust.

2. People are judgemental. They like to judge you based on what you say. If you don't like to talk or not good at talking big, they think you are weak in communication. In my mind, interview usually doesn't work, all smart companies have several rounds of interview to filter out who is genius and who sucks, because they know it's hard to *know* one person. When people think you are not good enough, work hard to prove them wrong.

Notes about PHP

This notes is for self reference. If it is not clear, please forgive me.

1. As of PHP 5.3.0, it's possible to reference the class using a variable. The variable's value can not be a keyword (e.g. self, parent and static).
Example, 
<?phpclass Foo {
    public static $my_static = 'foo';
}
$classname = 'Foo';
print $classname::$my_static . "\n"; // As of PHP 5.3.0

Being a Programmer...

A good programmer means enthusiasm, if do not have enthusiasm, then it means sacrifice...
More thinking, less coding. A programmer is not a typewriter. Producing code does not mean creating valuable code.

Think carefully before start coding, use the best time to think, worst time to code.