Hunchworks build design decisions

[Chris Blumberg]

Hello all,

My name is Chris, I am working as an intern for the global pulse team in NYC. During my internship I will be spending most of my time on building the back end of the HunchWorks project we are working on. I started work here last week on Tuesday, and from Wednesday onward I have spend most of the day working on the project. 

I have built 3 rough draft HTML examples so far from our design concept sketches and modified them to include things we saw needed to be included in the database as well. 

Some changes Sara and I have discussed and implemented some so far are:

1. users can import data from Linked In as well as Teamworks social websites.

2. Personal Data has been greatly expanded to include data such as Skype account, Instant Messanger, Phone Number, website, etc. We felt that users that wanted to get in touch with each other should be able to. However, none of this data will be required for an account. Also, we are most likely going to include security options for not sharing this data with all of your connections and communities, leaning towards a Facebook style security where users can limit what people see based upon what groups they are in. Facebook also allows users to create there own security groups, so only those groups have as much access as the users want them to. We also created a language preferred drop down that is required, to make it easy to know what language everything will be needed to translated to. We also have a security option drop down that I discuss in #9. 

3. There will be multiple input values for 

Expertise

Skills

Languages

Location Interests

As of now the user will enter the data in one text field as a comma separated list, then moving to multiple text fields, and most likely finally ending up with a drop down system, or search as you type system for these 4 fields. The finally system is meant to decrease the amount of data cleaning that will need to be done with users incorrectly spelling the same words. This also allows translation to be more accurate.  

Home page when you login has some big changes from design concept as well.

4. Under design the home page shows your location, based upon your location stated in your profile. At this time, we aren't sure if this is needed at the moment, but wil stay in for now. 

5. Needs to have a link to view your profile, and probably many other things such as communities, friends, etc. 

6. On the right side the design concept has a google earth view of the location of all hunches you are connected with through either your own hunches or community hunches. After discussing this, we felt that communities should most likely be a drop down menu for each of your communities and an ALL communities option as well. This would allow you to focus on a specific country such as Uganda and see all hunches for it, but always showing ALL hunches would require significant processing time on both the Database side and the webpage side. The default should not be ALL communities because it would most likely lead to more then 10 second loading times of the web page.

7. The sections "Recent Hunch updates" and "recent Confirmed Hunches" will at the beginning of the launch of Hunchworks be set for all global hunches, even if you are not part of that community or group. After a specified amount of time this will then change to only friends and communities. This is get users more involved at the launch when there may only be a few hundred users and less then a hundred hunches. Once the number of users reaches into the thousands or tens of thousands, this should no longer be needed. 

8. Also under the "Recent confirmed Hunches" section, it will not just include hunches that have been confirmed, but wil also include hunches that have been proven wrong and they will be labeled as such. We came to this conclusion after thinking that not all hunches need to be right to be interesting and attention worthy. A perfect example in my opinion would be Global warming being proved wrong.

9. Being concerned about privacy we have adopted a similar privacy setting to Facebook. Users will be able to modify their user profile/hunch/community setting to "Open" "Closed" and "Secret". Secret means that the user/hunch/community will not show up in searches and there is no way to find it without being given access to the user/hunch/community. This is mainly meant for the views of the outside world, and we will still most likely implement additional security measures previously discussed.

10. Other things we are thinking about:

How many recent hunch updates to show? Should it be a different tab then on the same page as Recent confirmed hunches.

How many recent confirmed hunches to show? Should it be a different tab? there is a view more button for all of these, so would this be a duplication of effort?

Searching the global map for hunches? Example, like 100 miles within Berlin, Germany. Only within the country Uganda? What will be the options here and limitations?

[PJ Onori]

Hi Chris, my colleagues and I at Adaptive Path are currently assisting the Global Pulse team with the design of HunchWorks. Would you mind if I shared this with the team?

[sara....@btinternet.com]

Hi PJ. No problem from here in sharing this. Chris(s)?

Sj.

[Chris Van Der Walt]

Not at all

[Chris Blumberg]

Nope, no problem here.

Update, we decided to go with "Open", "Closed", "Hidden" instead of using secret.

We also added in a link for importing Facebook profiles. 

---

From: "sara....@btinternet.com" <sara....@btinternet.com>
To: PJ Onori <pj.o...@gmail.com>; unglobal...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2011 6:39 PM
Subject: Re: [GPux] Hunchworks build design decisions