Tricky month for development. Matt was elusive due to other commitments. I had to start analyzing my programming options again. What can I do to pick up the pace?
- Pay Matt to ditch his other clients – can’t afford that
- Pay a UK programmer – can’t afford that
- Hire someone cheaper – not worth it
- Do it myself – not sure I can
- Partner with a programmer – costs me control
The site has been up for three months. I have not generated interest with online advertising. I am beginning to sense that it is time to let go of Look2Look and to turn focus onto the ‘groups application’. Last time we tried figuring out the groups application, we got stuck. I have done some more thinking and I may have cracked the problem. No details yet. As a research exercise, I studied Google Groups. It does pretty much everything I had hoped my groups application would do which leaves me wondering whether there is anything that I can add.
My quest for the perfect pitch and design hasn’t quite dissipated yet. Here is my latest effort:
Have made some functonal changes. Here they are:
1. The idea is to attach a discussion thread to each search. Up to this point, a discussion thread is only created when one user contacts another and is ‘private’ because only the two participants can see it. I saw that online classified advertising sites like Gumtree had public discussion threads linked to each search and thought a similar arrangement for Look2Look would make the application more compelling.
2. I also noted that Gumtree ads enabled the ad owner to write a personal message or expound upon the basic listing. I thought this feature on Look2Look might help make the application more compelling. Matt and I had difference of opinion about execution but resolved by end of month.
3. We got rid of a module that listed the latest chats by, instead, re-ordering the contacts in the Contacts module by activity (most recent at the top of the list).
4. We have struggled with how to persuade the new user to sign up to the application. Previously, our method was to ‘talk them into it’. Again, taking my cue from Gumtree, I thought a better way would be to make the application immediately interesting by enabling new users to see and search for searches without having to log in first. Initially, our concern was that this would undermine the point of the application – which was to record what people searched for – because people could search and leave no trace. However, I felt that there would still be a strong incentive to log in if the search facility on the logged outside was much less powerful than the facility on the inside. In other words, we had ‘quick search’ on the outside and the full cross-matching and filtering form on the inside – which saved your searches.