As of May 2, 2010, my thesis “beta” site has eight members now. It was five last week. I am happy that the number has increased even by a bit.
Screenshot of a landing page, May 2, 2010
My thesis Twitter account now has 78 followers, most of whom are either DIY nail artists/professional nail art technicians or amateur with some interests in nail art (don’t do nail art by themselves, but go to nail salons or have friends who work at salons). I really hope some of them come to my site and try it…
I have set a launch date for the beta version of my thesis project: Monday, April 12, 2010. Yes, that is in two days. I decided that I wanted to have some time for user testing so I can incorporate the user feedback as part of my thesis presentation.
Since last week, I have been spending most of my time adjusting the layout for each page, translating documents from English to Japanese, and adding teaser contents including nail art photos, YouTube videos, and several blog posts about the nail art trends.
My initial visual goal is to establish a site that feels friendly, open, and girly-dreamy (considering 96% of my target audience is females). I presented my half-baked thesis website during my thesis class on Wednesday, and received good feedback I needed to re-adjust the look and feel of the site.
Nailist Salon's old landing page - thumbs down
Here is a list of comments received in response to my site’s landing page (see above screen shot):
- Black menu bar is a little bold.
- A lot of text – overwhelming
- Maybe include illustrations of people or faces
- Maybe you need a mascot for your salon? That would be very girly and Japanese.
- The site looks like selling products. Show an image of hands.
- Splash page?
- Simplify the landing page.
- If you simplified the top banner, it might be better.
Redesigning the look
I was especially concerned about a heavy top navigation and text-oriented contents. I also thought it was interesting that one person suggested the site “looks like selling products”, because I used illustrations of nail products (nail polishes and a gel bottle) at the top banner. In response, I decided to use other materials – hands – to replace the old illustrations. I also adjusted the spacing between each section within a page to give more breathing space for users. I changed the background color of top navigation bar from solid black to light pink that matches with the top banner. I reduced the amount of text across the site for easier skimming.
Nailist Salon's revised landing page
Right now, I am heavily concentrated on debugging. I need to make sure that every step, from signing in and filing up profiles to posting photos and logging out, works smoothly. Tomorrow I will do the browser testing, which is always the trickiest part.
Testing plan
On Monday, I will announce the availability of Nailist Salon via Twitter and Mixi. After the launch, I will be monitoring the site traffic, users behavior, and will ask for their feedback (if I managed to get any users!). To analyze the usability of my site, I am planning to video record how users navigate through my site with a help of my Japanese friend. I will only have two weeks for user testing before summarizing my experience with the site for the final thesis presentation in May, but I hope to get out something tangible as I move forward!
It is an exhausting process to grow a potential user base on Twitter for my thesis project. Especially when you’re talking about people live who are on the other side of the planet. After crashing in my bed and waking up early in the morning, like 4am, I went back to my Twitter account to connect with more nail art enthusiasts in Japan. So far, “42 following, 22 followers” in five days. Not so bad. I had to unfollow some of users, who seemed to be tweeting some offensive and sexual messages. At some point, I plan on asking my Twitter followers about possible features they would like to see in my community site.
I thought of using CodeIgniter framework for my thesis project, but I had been worried that CI might not be good for building user forums. I found other services such as ExpressEngine, but they are paid ones, which I want to avoid for the first prototype.
Then I found Joomla, an open source php-based CMS. It offers pretty easy-to-understand admin panel, and allows to use different extensions and plug-ins for customization. I can tweak CSS to control the front end. It seems that I can definitely add AJAX and other components if necessary. It supports Japanese language. There are over 10 extensions for building user forums. Many extensions are available for media sharing and user profile management. The most encouraging part is that there is a list of example social networking websites, including GabberTube, a video-sharing community site, and MTV’s Quizilla, MTV’s community site for polls and quizzes. Their websites look pretty solid and have features I want to have on my website. I went over some video tutorials for Joomla too, and felt comfortable with the instructions. I think I am going to go with Joomla. Now it is time to download the Joomla package and start testing the framework.
After a midterm thesis presentation, I had to re-consider the choice of web framework. Many people responded to my initial selection of Drupal, suggesting that Drupal has a huge learning curve. They were right. This week I spent some time going over tutorials for Drupal, and concluded that it indeed has a complex structure. So I started hunting for the alternative.
PHP/MySQL web framework comparison. Source: http://www.phpit.net/demo/framework%20comparison/chart.php
Given that I want my framework to be based on PHP, I looked into major PHP-based applications including CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, and Zend. It seems that Cake and CodeIgniter(CI) are the two major players in the php framework battle. Cake offers more automated and well-structured framework, while CI offers light-weight and flexible solution with a low learning curve. A web developer Paul Shen makes a good comparison between the two in his blog. A developer Ekerete makes a good point in his blog about the benefit of using CodeIgniter by comparing it to Zend. Another developer Jonathan Snook supports Cake in his blog. I went to Cake and CI’s websites, checked their basic MVC structures, and felt more comfortable with the documentation and tutorials for CI. So I may start with CI and see how it goes.
For a quick site development, there are online platforms for creating social networking sites, such as Ning and BigTent. If I want to focus on widgets or apps, there is OpenSocial. I created an account for Ning to see how they structure their platform. It’s an easy, one-click solution, but does not have enough flexibility for controlling UI and functions. I will come back to Ning if I end up screwing up my framework development, and need a quick fix to my project. OpenSocial may be an interesting platform to use if I want to add some widgets or add-on features to my site.
Drupal will be my best friend for the next two months.
After I presented my finalized thesis idea last week, I started searching for different web application framework, hoping to find something suitable for my thesis project. I figured Drupal is a good place to start with. Drupal is an open source content management framework with built-in functions and add-on features including social networking, image file management, and user forums. It’s based on MySQL and PHP, languages I am very comfortable with, and supports Japanese! Yes! I need the Japanese support, because I am targeting Japanese nail enthusiasts for the first prototype. There is a fair amount of documentation available on Drupal’s website, and user forums are pretty active. Corey, one of ITP residents, told me that Amanda Bernsohn, ITP alum, used Drupal for her thesis project http://itsallaround.us/. It’s encouraging. I can always ping her if I need some help.
Here is a list of features I would like to learn more and assess if I want to incorporate them into my thesis project. It is a lot of information, so I will take advantage of the spring break, digesting all documentations and tutorials to familiarize myself with Drupal framework. I want to be able to start coding a prototype after spring break.
- Social Networking module
- Media and Files (including photos)
- Working with user-generated content (including Blog posts)
- Search module
- How to have authors notified by email when a comment is added to their articles
- Aggregation module: If I decide to add some content aggregation from third parties, this is the module to use