Lots of "Sketchy" Brainstorming (Week 2)

  • Jun 07, 2012
  • 2 Comments

This week was fun. We've settled into the swing of things, so everyone is working more independently and seems more comfortable with the code. Also, Michael and Shannon celebrated birthdays this week, so we all took some time Thursday afternoon to enjoy ice cream cake and chocolate.

Last week, before the weekly meeting and demos, but after posting my weekly blog entry, I added sub-tabs to the profile page for the purpose of listing the people a user follows and displaying their activities. The consensus at the meeting was that the tab-bar didn't have a place for followees (the people a user follows), so this week I changed that part of the profile page back to how it had been previously. Since a users' followees weren't going to have their own activities feed, it made sense to put their activities in with those of the user following them on his/her own activity feed. I did this, so when a user looks at his/her own activity feed, (s)he sees the activities of those (s)he follows as well. However, someone looking at another user's activity feed only sees that user's activities. An obvious problem arose: when a user performs an action, remixes a world for example, an action is received by both the sharer of the new world and the owner of the world from which the new world was remixed. The result was that duplicate actions showed up in the user's feed any time both the user and his/her followee received the same action. I fixed this so that the actions are filtered and only one version is displayed in the follower's activity feed.

Later on in the week I also added a sort option so that the default view of a user's activities feed shows both the user's actions and his/her followees' actions, but by selecting the "just me" sort option, a user can choose to display only his/her activities.

At last week's Friday meeting, it was decided that the Users index page should be redesigned and made more useful. The page would also make a great place to display relevant information about the people a user follows. As a first step in the redesigning of the page, I added the option to display only a user's followees. (Before, the only ways to sort were by how recently users had joined and by how recently they had logged in.) I want to sort the followees by the creation date of the corresponding following in descending order (i.e. when you newly follow a user, (s)he is shown at the top, and users you followed longer ago are lower down the list). I believe the problem is that I'm trying to sort records by a column in a different record's table, so I can't get "order" to work. I tried using "sort" instead, but it returns an array, which then breaks the paginate functionality that ordered records have. Jordana helped me find an example of how I might correct this issue using the "order" method. I tried following the example and still haven't quite gotten it working, so  that's near the top of my ToDo list still.

Jordana found some studies that suggest that knowing the gender of a role model (i.e. followee) might influence how connected a subject feels to the role model, and thereby influences how much the subject learns from the model. In response to this concept, I added gender as an optional field on the signup page, and made it so you can edit your gender from the edit profile page. If a user specifies his/her gender, it is displayed on his/her profile in the stats list beneath the user description. While creating the icons to indicate a user's gender, I stumbled across Wikipedia's open source icon repository, so I went ahead and made follow/unfollow icons, and added those as well.

This week there have been several brainstorming sessions involving various combinations of Jordana, Reilly (optionally pronounced "Bailey"), and I. We discussed ways a user's experience on the site should be different if they do or don't follow another user. We explored scenarios regarding whether or not a user should have followees suggested for/forced upon him/her, or be able to follow and unfollow other users at will. Should a user be able to follow just one user, a limited number of users, or as many users as (s)he wants? In what ways could we prompt users to set goals for themselves, and how can we then track whether or not the presence of role models influences how quickly users realize the self-assigned goals? Should we set goals for the users explicitly? When a user has set a goal, is it acceptable/effective to automatically bookmark helpful worlds for them? If so, how do we indicate that these worlds are suggested, rather than bookmarked by the user?

We agreed on the idea that users should be able select a certain badge as their "goal badge". The user's experience on the community website (and probably the IDE, as well) would then be subtly tailored to help them achieve the goal badge. This would be done by showing them specific users, worlds, and challenges that are deemed helpful in achieving the goal badge. As with any good brainstorming session, the next step was to design a plethora of sketches exploring different visual layouts for the ideas we settled on. (This occurred and many new sketches were born to loving homes.)

Part of this goal-setting system will involve being able to sort worlds, users, etc., by relevance. Since users don't need to understand how the worlds being suggested to them are found, I am currently referring to this [default] sort method as a "magic sort". For sorting users, the magic sort takes into account how many times a user's worlds have been remixed, what the user's most recently earned or highest level badge is, whether or not the user is being followed by the relevant individual, etc. Magic sort for worlds will be based on whether or not the world's creator is followed by the relevant individual, which badges the world's owner recently earned, which badges the world fulfills requirements for, how many times the world has been remixed, etc. Magic sort is going to be a way to take a user and some information about him/her, and find successful example worlds that are more likely to be about topics that interest him/her (based on the user's followees' interests), as well as being good coding examples (based on the worlds' badges, remixes, etc.).

Thus far the plan for the rest of today, Friday, and next week is to:

  • make more sketches of the things on the list Jordana, Reilly, and I compiled
  • finish fixing the way followees are displayed (reverse order)
  • change the users index page (partials) to match the sketches I've done (and okayed with Jordana), such that the user's most recent action appears, as well as their highest level badge (or maybe most recent?), which can be moused-over to reveal a thumbnail link to the world that achieved that badge
  • start implementing magic sort (minus the badges, since those don't yet exist on my branch) on the users and worlds page
  • add featured challenges to the challenge index page

Comments

  • jordana

    jordana said:

    <p>I really like the idea of replacing descriptions in the users page with more information that novice programmers would actually care about. Including badges in user partials will be awesome!</p> <p>As for ordering role models...how about a magic sort on them, too? Maybe we (being us with all the power and influence) care more about putting users at the top of the list who have more experience and would set a better example, rather than ordering followees from newest to oldest. That would also be really easy to implement.</p>

    Posted on Jun 08, 2012
  • caitlin

    caitlin said:

    <p>There's a lot of great stuff here. One thing to add into the mix is that it's going to be important for users to know which content might help them meet a goal. I think the notion of focusing on a particular goal is interesting, but it may also be helpful to support the "along the way goals". So if someone sees an animation that is just perfect for a world they are working on and it introduces something new, cool. The other thing that might be good is to use the badge-related info to provide a sense of what you might be getting into. As a brand new user who's only earned one or two badges, I might not want to remix even the coolest animation in the world from a world that has a thousand and ten badges.</p>

    Posted on Jun 08, 2012

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