Email harvesting

We saw that harvesting emails and sending them out to Universities gets us more and more users and traffic. So today we sat down and did our magic, we got over 3000 emails from 10 different Universities. 4 foreign Universities and 6 Estonian. We will make some changes to our application and then we are ready to send out these emails!
We nailed it

University of Tartu Newsletter!

We will be featured in the next Mondays University of Tartu intranet news letter!

They told they will test our product! Wohoo!

Milestones complete!

We were so pessimistic with our new milestones (because of our previous failures) that we surprassed our milestones already this week!

• Between 26th and today (28th) we had 129 unique visitors! Even from Hungary, Switzerland and US!
• We have (excluding our users) 21 registrations!
• We have 51 questionnaires in our database!

We created a new milestone for us! This is a treat for ourselves.(yes we are that ambitious)

• 500 unique visitors by the 10th of june

Goals for the week

• Fix as many bugs as possible and make improvements according to the feedback(A lot has already been done)
• Market, market market! We already completed our milestone this week and have over 100 unique visitors this week! We decided that sending direct emails is the most efficient way, so thats what we are going to do!
• Get as many registered users as possible. We already have over 20 registered users so we completed our milestone. We want to get even more by the end of the week!

Feedback and repairs

We got a lot of useful feedback from the huge user traffic and we have fixed most of the problems aswell:)

• We added a notification that currently, we dont support IE 9 and down
• We changed the wording on the view questionnaire page. Its not hashtag anymore. Its simply: "The students must write slot to find your question" We hope this makes it clear for the lecturers
• We also rephrased the student side of find questionnaire page
• We improved "about us" page
• We hope to get "getting started" and "front page video" ready tonight

IE HELL and lots of users!

The good news is that our site is overwhelmed by users!

The bad news it that a lot of people use IE! And we dont support IE 9 and down! Damn it!

Registered users

We already have 13 registered users and 23 questionnaires in our system!

New version live!

Our new version has gone up and live!

Just go and look at those beautiful round buttons on the List of questions page :)

Milestones

We went trough our milestones and here are our new milestones:

• We have over 70 page visits by the end of 3rd of June
• We have 20 registrations by the 3rd of June
• We have 40 questionnaires in the database by the 3rd of June
• We have 40 registrations by the 10th of June

Results

Results

Development results

• Minor design changes done. 
• Questionnaire now starts if you activate the question
• You can change your answer now!
• Notifications added when answering question

Marketing results

• Article is published
• 5 lecturer meetings done
• 225 meaningful channels followed in Twitter, got 22 followers (some venture capitalists, some lecturers and other education related channels, some entrepreneurs/mentors), made 14 tweets
• Count of unique visitors have raised to 42 visitors (one from india, one from USA, one from Latvia and others from Estonia)

Hypotesis

• Most of the meetings were demos. We hope they give us feedback next week
• Teachers liked it, but they didnt scream "Shut up and take my money!"
• We still think it is ready for beta testing
• We got some traffic through Twitter. but it's no enough and we must rethink our  Twitter activity

Goals we had this week

Development goals

• Make it so when you start a question when the questionnaire is not active, then the questionnaire becomes active
• Design improvomenets
• Make it so you can change the answer to your question

Marketing goals

• Meet as many teachers as possible and get meetings for the next week
• Find out if the teachers like our product and are intrested in it
• Get as much feedback from them as possible
• Publish an article about our software
• Get more webpage activity through Twitter

Hypotesis

• Our product looks cool and is easy to use for everyone
• Teachers really want our product Right Now
• The product is ready for beta testing
• We can get more weppage activity through Twitter

Meetings progress.

So this week I met /called quite a few lecturers and had sevelar meetings, also schedueled some for next week. We gave them a basic overview of our idea and gave a quick demo of the product, that has been developed.
 Altough there weren't any "OMG, I love this, take my money" moments, there was no extremly negative feedback, since mainly they were IT lecturers. Our enthusiasm was noted, and ideas, on what we should do next, were given.
  Suggestions ranged from "need multi-choice questions" to " could have a feature list document, which I would be happy to read" and "choice of exporting questions to other users"  . But the goal of getting traffic from future users was set and most of them wanted the webpage link just so they could click around some.

Milestones update

So these were our milestones.

1. Prototype at the 8th of April
2. First release of MVP on 6th of May 
3. Decent design by 13th of May
4. 10 Test Lecturers by 20th of May
5.A test lecture with more than 100 students by 15th of May
6. Paypal integration by 20th of May
7. Facebook,Google+,Twitter integration by end of May
8. 50 Users and 10 paying customers by the end of September

As we can see, the first release of MVP and Decent design (in our view) were goals that we established.
Why we failed the 100 student lecture, we wrote about it herehttp://demclicks.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-we-failed-milestone.html
Instead of 10 test lectures , we got only 2. Since again its so late in the semester and we took such time with the release of the MVP, it was really expected, that we wont reach this milestone. Then again, the fact that we reached out to many lecturers and got some personal feedback from them, is a positive fact.

Paypal integration--we failed this, since we realized , the idea of having a paid product is still some time away and this should not be our focus right away.

And we have set up our twitter and facebook sites and trying to get some traffic to our site from there. But the option if our user could just use those users instead, is not achievable. Again, we are focusing on the quality, not the quantatity of the features at first.

About the users/customers.......its far away, but we are hoping for the best. =)

Old blog restored

Our old blog is again up and you can see older posts from there: http://letsgamifyit.comli.com/

Our second article

Here is our second article. It was posted in reddit and we also tweeted about it. If you like it, retweet it and share it with your friends :)

How to improve education, students viewreddit.com/r/education/co…
— DemClicks (@DemClicks) May 23, 2013

Twitter madness

Today we invested time to follow different channels with our Twitter account. Mostly we follow now education themed channels but also a little bit entrepreneurship, press and mentor related channels (at the moment 108 channels has been followed). Purpose of doing it is to get as much traffic as possible to our page. We hope to get also at least 50 followers by the end of this week (at the moment 7 followers). We want to be noticed and we want to see how much does our Twitter activity increases the number of visits to our page, and using Google Analytics tool we can see how big is the conversion rate.

Follow 100 channels with one day:

Visit with another professor

So today Katre and Sirge went to talk with another professor. Unfortunately, they stumbled upon a bug. They also gave me steps to reproduce the bug, but this was the result:

Article progress.

Like the title says, the article is almost finished and finding a place where to post it, would be the next priority. The easiest place would be of course a big Estonian newspaper, but since the article is in English, this might be a little tricky. Therefore the channels, that I have searched in the previous week, need to be contacted again with the hope of publishing and then distributing it

The article is about how education software is a great opportunity to improve the feedback and communication in a classroom. As a teaser, here is the first paragraph.
 How does the perfect classroom look like? Everyone is being present, the students are having a discussion with the professor about the ideas presented in class, nobody is wasting time online browsing Facebook or Instagram. During the class, the professor is receiving sufficient feedback on his presentation, which in turn gives him an overview of what he did right and what still needs improving.

Where robots fail: Why education can’t just be digital

We might talk about improving the classroom experience, but we mustn't forget the people, who stand in front of the classroom and try to make us understand the subject, the teachers.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/17/where-robots-fail-why-education-cant-just-be-digital/

Here is a good article, which reminds us that you cannot digitize the whole education and why teachers are the main component of education. But this doesn't mean that they cant have some kind of tehnological help.

Design goals

So we did a lot of work yesterday, but a lot more has to be made. Here are our next design goals:

• Make CSS code more compact
• Make our design work on IE (and some design element on Mozilla), this goal is actually the biggest regarding the design but also very important, because a lot of lecturers still use IE.
• Make logo more sharper? (It looks a bit low quality at the moment)
• Question viewing on PowerPoint slides more clearer
• Button design under the list of questionnaires
• ...

 

Long, hard day

So we really have a long and hard day behind us. As usual, we had our codecamp, which lasted 12 hours again. Big thanks to Tambet, for providing company for me and doing good work :) (Repeat tomorrow, yay!)

• Loads of changes to the design
• Removed scrolling from most places
• Login and registration page now on the same page
• Questionnaire title is set on diffrent page then question creation
• Notifications all around for users
• Lots of bug fixes

And finally. The biggest change

One hashtag per questionnaire, not question!

Thats a mayor change and im really proud of it :)

The up side is that most of the huge work is done now

The down site is that this change was so major that it probably introduced new bugs. unfortunately we have no unit tests(yay for hackatlon), so this is me tomorrow, when im updating our website:

Blog address updated at DemClicks.com!

You can now see blog straight from our products webpage ! WOOHOO

Development progress

Our registration and login page have been joined! Also, there are clear messages for the user, what is going on now!

Also, users are redirected to the creation of questionnaire, when they first login! And the questionnaire title and question itself are now on different page!

Finally, User now sees, how many questions he has done! Also, there are delete and change buttons on listofquestions page!

Hypotesis results

• We found out that 1 hashtag per question is bad. We decided that we are gonna implement 1 hashtag per questionnaire, which seems like a lot better idea
• Student apathy came out really quick in the  test lecture and only 6 of 7 students answered the question, even though everyone had computers
• Our program worked fine. There were some hickups in registration, but thats been fixed now

Goals this week

• Test our software in a real lecture
• Get student and teacher feedback
• Fix various bugs on our software
• Join registration and login page
• Redirect the user after email verification to the create questionnaire page
• Implement various status messages

Hypotesis this week

These were our hypotesis this week. We couldnt write them down sooner, because our blog broke

• Students are eager to try out our program
• Hashtag is understandable for everyone
• Our program works well and doesnt crash

Metrics.

How would we measure the data we got from field testing? We gave it a lot of thought and we came up with some metrics.
1.Registered user who have created at least one questionnare

• This is useful, so we can understand that if the flow from entering to the page to the registering is good and smooth

2.How many questionnares have been answered by more than one person in a week

• This is good indicator, which shows if our product is getting more popular and is used more and more ofter or if we are failing somewhere. This metric is probably slow, if its summer or winter. We need the "More the than one person" to rule out teachers tests.

3. How many new questionnares are created in a week, which isnt a users first questionnaire

• This metric is good in showing our overall progress and progress towards our goal

4. How many people have answered in a week.

• This metric is good in showing our overall progress and progress towards our goal

Why we failed a milestone?

We had to have a lecture with 100 students for 15th of May.
Since by this time, there is hard to find a lecture with 100 students this close to the end of semester. And a lot of students are already on their exam period, but there might be hope for us yet, since there might be some medical lectures with this amount of students. But we got a lecture with 7 students and 6 of them replied which is circa 85 precent.

New blog

Well since there is a problem with our previous blog, we decided to make a new blog.
About our previous content, we are working on getting in back. This is very important so we could see how our personal progress came along.