Wokai Adventures

To perfect wokai.org? Or, to wait?

Casey

Since we started beta testing almost two months ago an argument has been building within the Wokai team about whether to channel our energy into enhancing the frontend, public features of the site, and to begin developing new features, such as our user-generated China microfinance resource, OR to hold back and complete admin systems in our current site that the user never sees, but must be finished before version 1.0 of the site can be considered complete.

We've received amazing feedback from the initial community of contributors on ways that the site and user experience can be enhanced. In all of our heads, we also have this huge vision of what the site could become and all of the features that we need to add to take it there.

Leslie, Wokai's Marketing Director, and I are in one camp, advocating that we shouldn't start marketing Wokai on a mass scale until we've implemented our laundry list of ideas and have a site that we love.

On the other side of the argument is, Larry Sun, Wokai's Product and Technology Director, who says we should make sure that all of the features that are currently on the site work perfectly by the end of the year, then focus for the next three months on completing the backend admin systems.

 

         Me                   Leslie                            VS                                       Larry

 

                                   

                                

                   

Larry keeps telling us, "what we need to do now is just build a user base, analyze user traffic over the next few months, and then in the second or third quarter of 2009, start making frontend enhancements." On the other end of the argument, Leslie and I see the homepage and cringe, thinking "what a horrible use of space...it's not interactive enough...none of the best features of the site come through to the user that spends 2 seconds on our site then leaves because it's not worth their time...". We're sitting frantically mapping out the content and contributors that we want in the information resource part of the site.

Given the fact that Larry has over six years of experience at Google and Microsoft, he's winning now....

Wokai's current, homepage:

I'm sure this is the age-old dilemna that anyone who has built a website has run wrestled with.

Would any of you that have found a happy balance between working on future developments and stabalizing core features, please share what you've learned along the way?

Calling all Wokai Evangelists

Casey

After over a year of development, we are proud to announce that Wokai.org is almost ready for launch! However, we need your help to take the site from good to great, making sure the site functions smoothly, finding the kinks in the system, and maximizing the user experience. This Friday, we will launch the Wokai.org Pilot Program.  We're looking for 200 people to test out the site by making $50 in contributions directly to microentrepreneurs in Inner Mongolia, and providing feedback on this process.

Here is a preview of the Wokai.org site:

If you are interested, or if anyone you know is interested, there are two ways to sign up for the Pilot Program:

1)  Sign up on Facebook, by signing up to attend the Wokai.org Pilot Program.

2) Email Chris Glen in Beijing. ([email protected])

Once you have signed up, Chris will email you all relevant instructions and materials.

If you can think of any family, friends, or acquaintances that fit the Wokai.org Pilot Contributor mold, please continue to pass on the word.

We're counting on you to make Wokai.org a reality!

Day 18 - Website battle scars

Casey

I'm sitting here at my computer about an hour away from ending my Thursday workday. Today has been eventful day to say the least. George, who has been with us for 9 months, just returned from a 6 week stint back in England, Chris, a new Wokai intern from U Michigan started this morning and Li Guang, the junior developer on our website, joined us this afternoon to start working at the Wokai office today.

The website has been a major theme for me over the past few days. On Tuesday, we were supposed to do the second round of Alpha (bug) testing on the Wokai website. Four of us were going through test cases and looking for bugs on the site. What we were finding weren't bugs as much as features that were missing all over the site. After about an hour, it became clear to me that state of our site development hadn't yet reached the stage where we should be Alpha testing, instead, Ran Xin, Li Guang, and I should be finishing the development and then we should start Alpha testing. Over the course of a few minutes, I went from thinking we were two weeks into Alpha testing to realizing that we were two weeks away from starting Alpha testing.

[Imagine me frustrated...what's funny is when I went to search google images under "frustrated" a third of the images that came up had people throwing computers]

What's been confusing, and why I didn't realize this before, was that my tech mentors had been telling me that a site only has to be around 80% completed to start testing. What I didn't realize was that 80% has many meanings. We are definetly 80%, if not more more like 90%, done with the site, but, given the way that our developers are building the site, in which they're working on everything simultaneously, for us that means that every feature is still 10% away from actually working right.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that the process of finding all of the holes made us see how we could improve the logic and structure of the site, and now the programmers are grinding ahead. When we launch we'll have a much stronger site than we would have if we hadn't been continually rearchitecting our systems through the course of development and somehow we'll pull off a completed and bug tested site in time for live Beta testing next month. This is a great learning process, I'm sure future developments will seem like a breeze compared to building the site from scratch, but man, is this frustrating.