So, what do you think?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Haro de Grauw on March 14, 2008 at 5:31am

Looking good, Nick!

The structural appearance is great; some room for aesthetic improvement though.

I'm using openSuse Linux / KDE / Mozilla Firefox, and the website is displaying in a rather awkward font; I will upload a screenshot so you can see it. I'm not sure which font this is but it is very nasty to use - can you change to something like Tahoma, Arial, Albany AMT...?

Also, it's a bit awkward searching for other people - which is one of the key features of this site! There is the "Search" box in the top right corner and it is good, but there should be a special function to search people (i.e. which only displays people as results); this could also have an "advanced search" feature that allows you to search for people on basis of skills/location/experience.

That, in turn, would require that people select their skills/experience from a checkbox list rather than writing a text....

Good luck, and thanks for making this!
Haro

Attachments:

• snapshot3.png, 34 KB

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Permalink Reply by Nick on March 14, 2008 at 11:42am

Thanks.. you're not looking too ropey yourself! ;)

Again, some good points Haro. I've passed the first onto our techies.
On the searching for people, we did have a tab which was just for "members", but it felt too much like a social networking site, whereas we wanted the focus to be on projects, so we removed it. (NB: You can still get to this page if you click on "View all" in the members' box on the home page).

However, the ablility to search people by skills / experience is something we want to build in... it's key to our goal of using the power of social networking to deliver some real good! - so we're looking at how to build that into the next update. However, having a checklist of skills is obviously a bit restrictive... so we'd probably continue to do it on tags /key words.

Glad you're enjoying the site... keep feeding back, it's good to hear!

Cheers, Nick

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Permalink Reply by Haro de Grauw on March 14, 2008 at 5:42am

A few notes on the creation of projects.

Is there any particular reason why the privacy policy cannot be edited after the project is formed? I think this is necessary, not only because people will want to use this website differently, but also because projects tend to evolve, and so do their needs.

In the "edit this project's info" page, the button "delete project" is located where you would expect "ok" / "confirm" to be - this is very dangerous!!

Otherwise looks very good. I mentioned the search facility either - advanced searching through groups will become necessity, especially once you (hopefully!) start having many thousands of them! Again, this may mean you should require projects to specify more information about their nature (issues dealt with? way of dealing with them? location? open membership? ....).

Keep going! :)
H.

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Permalink Reply by Nick on March 14, 2008 at 11:27am

It's a good point about changing the privacy 'status'... agreed that projects needs change. All I can say at present is that it's not one of the "easy" things to change; however, we'll log it and look into it.

Just had a look and see what you mean about the "Delete info" button... ;) ... again, something we'll add to the list. In the meantime, you can be reassured that there is a quite clear "Are you sure?"-type message that comes up if you do click it accidentally. And only the designated project's administrator(s) can get to this page.

The search facility is very basic at present. Don't forget it's just a pilot test/beta site! I agree with your point... if you see our mock-ups available as a PPT file on the "About" tab, you'll see we've thought primarily of using tabs as a search tool. But we'd like to record more basic information about projects put down somewhere (at the moment, we've asked people to include in 'Description' area). Another thing we're looking at when we get to that stage is a more complex search for 'similar' words... e.g. if you type in "composting" you get no projects, but if you type in "composters" you get one which is all about composting. Thanks for pointing it out... we've taken note!!

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Permalink Reply by Haro de Grauw on March 14, 2008 at 5:44am

Also, on this very page where I am now writing a note for this forum discussion: the text box where I am writing is in the wrong place, because it is between the messages! The first message is above it, and then the subsequent messages continue below - this is not very clear. You should either have the textbox above or below all messages, I would recommend below.
H.

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Permalink Reply by Nick on March 14, 2008 at 11:16am

I'll pass this point on to our techys. Do other people find it confusing?

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Permalink Reply by Haro de Grauw on March 14, 2008 at 5:59am

Very important and urgent point: there must be a way of inviting people to projects!? Right now if I click "invite more people" I can then provide email addresses - how do I just invite somebody who is already on project dirt?
Cheers,
H.

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Permalink Reply by Nick on March 14, 2008 at 11:14am

Thanks Haro - useful. I thought we'd bottomed this one out, but clearly not. We'll look into it.

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Permalink Reply by Nick on March 14, 2008 at 11:36am

OK - had a look. Once you're a member of a project (and provided you're logged in), you should have the option to "Invite Friends"... we could change this to "Invite Project Dirt friends" or something like that? ... you might not have been able to see this if you were brand new to the site when you had tried and did not yet have any PD friends! ... can you let me know if a) it's still not clear, b) you can't get this option, or c) this doesn't answer your point!

(We've deliberately not allowed projects to invite "all people" on Project Dirt, or it could be abused by projects and users will begin to be annoyed).

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Permalink Reply by Haro de Grauw on March 17, 2008 at 11:41pm

Another thought: it is now only possible to send personal messages to friends; when a person is not my friend, I can write on their Wall, but not send them a message. I understand there are reasons for this (amongst others, possible abuse of the private messaging system for bulk messages), but personally I would like to be able to message anyone.

The reason why I need this now is that I will decline someone's request to join a project, but I have no way of explaining why. From the project window, I can only click "Ignore", but not add a message, and I have no other way of communicating with this person - other than a public Wall post. It might be a good idea to add the possibility of writing a message when you reject someone's application to join a project.

Cheers,
Haro

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Permalink Reply by Nick on March 18, 2008 at 1:43pm

Hi Haro - OK, good point. I'll discuss with the Dirt team. However, I think you may have pre-empted our answer on that one. For the moment, can you come up with a reasonably polite form of negative response for the people's public wall? Or shall we look at how you could put some likely reasons for decline (or requirements for membership) into the main 'group' page alongside the membership request box?

Also, I presume you've seen that on the Privacy settings - you can either allow, or not allow, people to request an invitation. (NB: I've noted that you can't change this yet once the project has been set up, and it's on our to-do list...).

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Permalink Reply by Emilia Melville on March 19, 2008 at 6:22pm

I think that it would be useful to be able to have sub-projects or sub-groups of projects - CUECS has several projects, CUSU Green has several teams including Go Greener, The Climate coalition is a coalition, and so should be linked into its various members or something... is this possible?

Emilia

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