Pitch Reaction

Overall, I felt my pitch went quite well. Some of the good things I took away from peoples reaction were mainly that I need to smooth it over a bit. One thing that I also received suggestions on was having some kind of visual aid to go along with my presentation. I absolutely agree with the general consensus on my pitch.

Some things I have planned to do in preparation for the next pitch is to continue practicing it and memorizing it so that I will come out more fluidly and genuinely. It seems to me that the most compelling speakers I have seen appear so comfortable in the situation almost casual but in a very professional way.

One other thing I definitely need to do is make slides that I can practice with someone on my team. This way people have something to follow more easily. I might start off with just black and white slides and some large bullet points that will be important for prospective investors to follow. This way, I can tighten up my pitch while adding a visual element other than the live demo. This will hopefully get people more receptive to my suggestions about why our app is awesome.

I plan to have some themed slides for the final pitch that way to but a nice polish on everything. I also thing that David and Justin have some good ideas about the live demo so that will also be cool.

Preparing for the pitch

For the pitched, I decided to build it around the "goldilocks" method. In the intro I identify a problem that should be addressed in some way and can hopefully be solved in software. Then I describe similar software that are out there. I am careful to make a distinction that there are actually two different categories of software whose goal is to bring awareness to people about their impact on climate change. I note good and bad qualities about both, then point out how our software, while similar to both kinds of climate change related software, is very different in that it bring together the "best of both worlds". I plan to go into a bit of detail about what our software is and does and about the story that the software attempts the get the user involved in. After that, Justin will do a basic demo of the application, highlighting various features. We have rehearsed the pitch a few times so hopefully things will go relatively smooth on Monday.

I also hope that people will give us good constructive criticism so that we can make the application even better.

This week in GERA

This week was pretty busy in terms of getting things ready not only for the client meeting, but also for getting ready for our pitch on Monday. We addressed quite a bit of the user experience issues that were pointed out in previous meetings. This week consisted of implementing and polishing some of the ux stuff like the points system and also creating more of a story and point that will make the user want to continue using the application. This was done by making missions that the user is expected to complete. These missions simply correspond to doing things with in the application like filling in data for the first time or at all, for filling in data that are from previous months, and for improving there overall footprint which means decreasing the amount of carbon the emit in a given period of time. Certain missions are only available to users of a high enough rank. Once they reach this rank, a new mission is unlocked and they can then proceed to collect a point value for that particular mission.

This will not be demo-ed in any significant way during the pitch as it is still in a very early stage of development and demoing it a few days after its design would be a bad idea. However the majority of the sight will be demo-ed during the pitch.

Website Redesign

Introduction

The big thing I worked on in the week leading up to the client meeting with Nikan was website flow and user experience. I decided that since the website is based around gamifying carbon emissions tracking, the theme should be consistent with this vision. After talking with my group members about this, we all agreed that this would be a good idea for several reason. However, because of this redesign, there will be some other issues to overcome that I image Dave will address in this week client meeting. I part of this week has been, in addition to implementing the guiders and making the user experience more enjoyable, I have been trying to think of ways that we can justify or redesign to Ackley in the hopes that we wont be caught quite as unprepared as we were with our most recent meeting with him.
The following sections will describe some of the potential pros and cons to the redesign we have implemented in the hopes that we can find a good way to justify the redesign.

Redesign Pros

The user experience will be much better because, not only does the new theme work well with this, but also because we now have something that an audience will hopefully be able to better identify themselves with.

Redesign Cons

The theme is one in which you become part of an alliance to combat the evil "Big Petroleum" by tracking your carbon emissions. Because of this theme, and the artwork, it may be the case that we are now marketing to a niche group and will therefore not as accessible to some users.

Conclusion

Leading up to this client meeting, we have decided that it is important for us to meet up and present. It is likely that I will be presenting most of it since I am in a sense the letter and that seems to be the group consensus, however, we will all be participating in the practice presentation process, while simultaneously attempting to address these and other issues as we come across them. Hopefully this added preparation will be beneficial. I imagine it's better than doing nothing though.

Action Item

During the client meeting, one thing that Nikan pointed out that Dave had already addressed with the flow issue. One of the major issues we are having with our application is the user experience (UX). David Lochridge had mention something about using the guider.js API to enhance the users experience and I agreed that was something we should consider.

Since I have been in charge of the flow of the website I proposed being responsible for that and as such that was my task for this week. I did run into some issues about how to allow anonymous user to be guided through basic site navigation without having the guider popups continuously pop up every time a user went to a different page. Today I did manage to get things figured out and now it is a matter of styling the guides appropriately with the theme of the website, which we actually ended up redesigning quite considerable.

In my next blog, I will discuss exactly what that redesign consisted of and why we thought it appropriate to do so.

Client Meeting Reaction

Overview

The client meeting with Dave was a real eye opener. It put into perspective that we still have quite a ways to go in terms of our application. I was a little disappoint in myself for not being more prepared for it. Part of the issue I feel was that I was focusing a lot more on the back end stuff and getting the core functionality finished without paying enough attention to the user experience. I do understand that user experience is of central importance to this project, however, I suppose I was expecting the meeting to be focused more on action items that we had planned on presenting. Dave pointed out several issues concerning our application and while I wasn't thrilled with his overall reaction, he made several valid points. The one that hit home the hardest was the flow of the website. We essential have no flow as he pointed out which is a real issue. We can't expect to create a successful application if there is no rhyme or reason behind the navigation. If the application isn't easy for a user to understand and follow, there is little chance they will come back and use it again. Based on this, I have a plan that will hopefully help in creating a more natural flow of actions that will hopefully improve the usability of the application.

Improvements

The first thing I will be doing is going back to some of the websites that track carbon emissions to try and understand better how the user is prompted for information and also understand the general layout. I will take note of my personal preferences for certain behaviors and flows and see if these things can be applied in some way to our application. I am hoping that by going back to the research phase with an emphasis on user experience, that next meeting will be more successful in terms of presenting an application that a user will actually want to use.

Conclusion

The client meeting helped me understand some of the short comings that our application has and where it needs improvements. Dave did say that he felt that we had a lot of pieces which was a nice positive and he is correct in that aspect. We are lacking in the user experience area though which is no good and I feel partially responsible as the application proposer because I should have had a more concrete understanding of how I wanted the user to navigate the site. I focused more on the back end and it hurt this client meeting. I am confident though that I will be able to make some concrete deciscions that will turn our app around and make it a better experience for users.

Guest Speaker Reaction

Introduction 

On Monday, Dave had a guest speaker come in. Jeff VanDyke, founder of VanDyke software and UNM alumni spoke about various aspects of the software development industry as they are practice by his company. Topics like, development methodology and business model were address during his topic. He also answered questions posed by the class and by Dave. His company uses extreme programming for implementing features. He also mention after class when I was asking him questions that they do emphasis testing code however they do not spend too much time dedicated specifically to writing tests for trivial functionality. He also mentioned that ideas are fleshed out in advance although formal specifications are not used. I thought the use of extreme programming and the lack of formal specifications were important enough that I am going to do a "define, defend, attack" analysis of them in how they relate..

Extreme programming: 

Define

An agile development strategy that emphasis short burst of feature implementation known as sprints. The idea is that this development technique is more adaptive to changing client demands.

Defend

Being a CS undergrad seems to breed agile developers. It feels that we are always on the grind and always having to be highly adaptive to our situation based on the work load our professors put on us. This has been especially true of this class the client meetings can be good or bad depending on what kind of demo we have.

Attack

This method of development  has been serving our team well in some respects, and if it used in industry, I imagine it will serve us well in the future. The disadvantage is that I imagine most of us are use to at least a semi formal specification of what needs to be achieved which we don't really have for this project. I have tried my best to define the scope of the project and a specification of features to be implemented however this model has had to adapt based on client meetings so it has been hard finding a balance.