Features for User Accounts Please Suggest!!

[PandaMoOo]

So far it seems the initial roll-out of the site gradecalpoly.com has gone smoothly. I've recieved few complaints, so it's time to start adding new features.

As Of 9/25/2004 Current Upgrades are still in the works:
-Tweaking the Schedule System to be easier to use. (Adding roomnumber)
-Perhaps upgrading to a more professional design. (Your opinon could change this greatly.)
-Changing a lot of the wording on the site to be easier to understand.

Alright! Once that is done, I'll probably take a week break and sip some cool lemonade before I get movin' on my next project:

USER ACCOUNTS

But I need Ideas! I'd prefer to only do things once, and do them right, so this where YOU the user can get the features YOU want. No Feedback, or bad feedback, and you get NO features or BAD features. Clear?

Use this thread as a place to suggest features you want to accompany User Accounts, before I start working on them I probably will have a poll to see what other users value the most so I can use that to determine what to add.

Please help my giving a second to think about what you'd want!

[PandaMoOo]

Possible Ideas I have:
-Personal Information Page detailing your academic history.
-Stores all the classes you took, and provides you with a history of classes/teachers you took conveniently.
-Your friends can search by your name or screenname to find your current schedule.
-Comments you submit may be linked up to your account so students can see what YOU thought about teachers.
-Lets you find other students in the same classes as you.


Another Idea which is much much harder but definately worth considering is:
-Implement all of the above and also;
-Store graduation requirements on the server, and compare what classes you've taken with that information; to suggest classes to take next quarter. (This is obviously EXTREMELY hard, because the only place graduation requirements are in are PDFs... so i'd have to automate the loading of each one, and i'd have to do one per major per year as new requirements are added for graduation.... but it may be worth it.)

[Steven]

Originally Posted by PandaMoOo

Possible Ideas I have:
-Personal Information Page detailing your academic history.
-Stores all the classes you took, and provides you with a history of classes/teachers you took conveniently.
-Your friends can search by your name or screenname to find your current schedule.
-Comments you submit may be linked up to your account so students can see what YOU thought about teachers.
-Lets you find other students in the same classes as you.


Another Idea which is much much harder but definately worth considering is:
-Implement all of the above and also;
-Store graduation requirements on the server, and compare what classes you've taken with that information; to suggest classes to take next quarter. (This is obviously EXTREMELY hard, because the only place graduation requirements are in are PDFs... so i'd have to automate the loading of each one, and i'd have to do one per major per year as new requirements are added for graduation.... but it may be worth it.)

The lack of anonymity would probably deter students from commenting. If linking of accounts to comments were optional though, I think it would be fine.

[PandaMoOo]

Originally Posted by Steven

The lack of anonymity would probably deter students from commenting. If linking of accounts to comments were optional though, I think it would be fine.

Yeah, I see your point. I was planning on it to be an option. Thanks for input!

[PandaMoOo]

User Accounts Coming in 2-3 Weeks!

Current Features Planned, please suggest more you may have.
-Stores all your schedules online so you can view them, from anywhere.
-Lets people that know your handle or name to find your schedule information.
-Lets you find other students that are taking the same class as you, and lets you e-mail them without you seeing their e-mail address.
-Lets you save classes you want, and e-mails you as soon as the backend updates its information, and finds the class you want is opened. This is by CRN#, or Course ID "MAT104" (eg.).

User accounts will not be mandatory to continue using current features.

Another feature in the works: Adding book classifieds for students who are selling books. i.e. you search for MAT105 in a schedule, and the text "Need a book for MAT105, 3 students have it for as low as $65.00!" I'm going to look into pairing up with ASI books? or that one book store place that deals in used books, don't know their name... so need to find it

[Bronco]

I would like to suggest some sort of Graphical Representation of instructors' grades associated with current letter grade system. The graphic could be a bar graph (like the poll results on these forums), or different colored/shaped smilies like BizRate's store ratings, or even better... something new and unique!

Keep up the good work on the website

[PandaMoOo]

Originally Posted by Bronco

I would like to suggest some sort of Graphical Representation of instructors' grades associated with current letter grade system. The graphic could be a bar graph (like the poll results on these forums), or different colored/shaped smilies like BizRate's store ratings, or even better... something new and unique!

Keep up the good work on the website

Hmm... good idea... I'll think about what I can do with that later on as more grades come in. Now there are still only about 10% of the teacher population "graded" so it wouldn't be too useful for now... another thing I have to worry about it keeping all the information consolidated and compact. Graphics although easy to read and look nice, may take up more space then worthwhile so bizrate look might be the way to go.

Thanks for the suggestion!!

[PandaMoOo]

Your post about graphical evaluations has got me thinking... perhaps I could develop some kind of system to encourage teachers to recommend the site to students. Perhaps a ranking of teachers based on new information within the last month for instance:

"Most Knowledgable Instructor of the Month!"
"Most Skilled Instructor of the Month!"
"Nicest Teacher of the Month!"
"Most Challenging Teacher Of The Month!"

Perhaps other categories too... ad revenues aren't bad, perhaps I could use the money to send a couple of nice award plaques every year to the teachers.

That sure does good for the GREAT teachers... but little for the good teachers. Hmm iono... some teachers are really nice and good, it might be nice and good to have what the students be said, be brought to their attention... well most of the good comments at least Thoughts? Feelings? Comments?

[zoedragon]

These are some pretty awesome ideas! I don't know how much plaques cost, but it could be as simple as a paper certificate. The 99-cent store also sells various frames, some are actually quite nice.

As for the graphical representation of the teacher's grades accumulated so far, it would definitely help students get a quick overview, especially if there's a long list. Makes it easier to pick out the stand-outs. If bandwidth is an issue, it doesn't necessarily have to be an image. It could even be HTML tables -- you know, colored cells or something like that. Wouldn't be as pretty as an image, but it would get the job done with less bandwidth.

[PandaMoOo]

Originally Posted by zoedragon

These are some pretty awesome ideas! I don't know how much plaques cost, but it could be as simple as a paper certificate. The 99-cent store also sells various frames, some are actually quite nice.

As for the graphical representation of the teacher's grades accumulated so far, it would definitely help students get a quick overview, especially if there's a long list. Makes it easier to pick out the stand-outs. If bandwidth is an issue, it doesn't necessarily have to be an image. It could even be HTML tables -- you know, colored cells or something like that. Wouldn't be as pretty as an image, but it would get the job done with less bandwidth.

Hmm... framed certiques would be nice. Perhaps right about this time every quarter I could count all the submissions recieved about the last quarter and give the awards out. So... "Most knowledgable teacher of Summer Quarter 2004!" etc etc... I'll even take pictures of them if they let me... and put them on the website. I only worry that some teachers that "win" will only be reviewed once/twice a quarter... and that that "don't win" may be REALLY good, but not be reviewed. Doing yearly winners only would solve this problem pretty well though... but yearly winners are too far an inbetween to give much recognition!

What about possibiliy coloring the field behind the grade? I really don't see anyway to get anymore space in there without destroying the table look.

So... A: would be a solid green, S: would be a solid yellow, and U: would be a solid red. Outstanding would be blended green and yellow. Needs Improvement would be blended into an Orange.

I only worry that all those colors would be confusing to students!

[zoedragon]

Originally Posted by PandaMoOo

So... A: would be a solid green, S: would be a solid yellow, and U: would be a solid red. Outstanding would be blended green and yellow. Needs Improvement would be blended into an Orange.

I only worry that all those colors would be confusing to students!

That might be a little confusing. I don't think the individual grades for each comment submission needs to be color coded. That would start to look kind of busy I think. I believe what people are wanting is kind of an overall rating. For example, on Amazon.com people enter their comments plus their own star rating. Let's say 10 people submit their ratings on a Sony stereo. When people search for stereos, all the stereos they sell are listed with stars next to each item. The stars next to the Sony stereo will be an amalgamation of the 10 ratings people gave. Because Amazon sells hundreds of stereos, having this type of graphical summary of all ratings helps users visually pick out the best ones. When you click on the item for more details then you can see the individual ratings and comments.

I think Amazon.com is an excellent model to follow in terms of ratings. People can vote on which ones are useful, and the more useful ones are listed first while the more useless ones are more towards the bottom. That probably isn't necessary though. Just the graphical summary of the ratings would be cool.

[PandaMoOo]

I do agree that would be nice and helpful... graphical comparisons would be easy but it would be rather bulky to do such comparison with ALL four of difference teacher rankings. That is what I have be considering all along, I guess that's not really nescessary, in fact 4 bars of information per teacher would be rather confusing!

Perhaps I shall just adopt amazon's style of ranking. I will get the OVERALL grade of teachers and use that to do a 1-5 stars based system next to the schedule finder system. And also put it next to the teachers name.

Anything else would be too complex, breaking it down to a 1-5 star ranking seems to oversimplify it... but at least more information is readily available. Thanks zoe for your input!!

I've started working on User Accounts now... beta.gradecalpoly.co m. Probably be another one or two weeks before I do the big, full featured release.