Category: Projects

Had a great session today. Since our last discussion on how the review form should look, we had posed our current solution to our consultants. “They had a lot to say” is a bit of an understatement.

Our group chat popped off for hours with thoughts, proposed solutions, little features that they thought might be cool (no one asked but that’s expected), but overall their views were pretty insightful. E and I didn’t really discuss the consultant thoughts during our following session. We kind of wanted to digest everything first, so we waited a session to bring it up. I like how we are usually on the same page and if we aren’t, we are completely comfortable talking it out until we either are on the same page or are okay with being on different pages. I have really enjoyed working on this project with him.

So today we finished the review form discussion. As I feared, it brought about many changes. I’m okay with changes. My issue with them is that they take time. So when people propose changes, they propose adding time to a project. It can be hard for some people to remember that.

Before the changes and discussions and consultants we had a form that was 4 questions and a text box. The first question was a scale from 0-100, the other 3 were radio boxes (styled as switches). E and I had eliminated one of the switches before we even brought the consultants in leaving the scale, 2 radios, and text box. We both really like the granularity of the form. Allowing uses to be as specific as they wanted. This was one of the original intentions. The other was to allow everyone to have a voice, even those that don’t like typing in boxes (fuckin weirdos).

However, after much back-and-forth, and throwing around words like subjective, objective, leading, redundant, necessary, consumer, end-user, experience, motivation, and the likes, we decided to do away with most of the form. What we landed on was much simpler: the scale question and the text box.

First off, the scale was changed from 0-100 -> 1-10. The zero-inclusive might’ve been an error on our part. E initially pushed for 100 for granularity. But we slimmed that down to 10 data points. I mention this in the previous dev-log.

Then we removed the other questions. The switches that is. Because, no matter how much we discussed it, the truth is that they weren’t really needed. We made it too fancy. In fact, we wasted tons of dev time on implementing it. It’s not a complete waste, I’m a better WP and AJAX developer now, but still.

Before we called it, I wanted us to be sure. We can’t change it later. We shouldn’t change it later at least. So we spent some time discussing scenarios. We discussed our target users. E said something nice while going over a possible scenario. He was pretending to be a user. We concluded that most people using our form will be motivated by an emotion, usually a strong emotion. “The scale is a sanity check” is what he said. Perfect description. After we check their sanity, why waste anymore time? Let them type out their thoughts and move on. It worked for me. It worked for E. We implemented the changes.

Now next time I have to make sure I test the fuck out of everything. But that’s future Luke’s problem.

Time next time, baby ✌️

Wait…P.S. I had a great conversation with a friend about possibly starting a new project. Also, I tried banh mi for the first time. Game changing sandwich. What a world.

Had a lengthy Horse Armor meeting the other day. We discussed the submission form on the website. We originally wanted people to rate from 0-100 with 100 being the most “aggressive” score. It was suggested to avoid negative connotations. We decided to reverse the score and change the scale to 1-10.

There are many studies on the value of using different scales in ratings. Apparently, most studies find that 5 or 7 are the best with the latter being the most accurate. However, the difference can be nominal. Accuracy of a rating can drop with more data points to choose from. You see diminishing returns after 11.

Also, the more questions there are, the less the scale tends to matter. That and the fact that with a big enough dataset, most inaccuracies in statistics often correct themselves.

Our form doesn’t need that much thought. We just need it to be 1) easy and 2) make immediate sense to the user.

We also removed a question from the form. We have two new members of the “team” that were added as consultants. We are running this all by them to make sure there isn’t anything we may be missing because one thing you don’t want to do is change the data after the fact. That could dirty up your data.

Overall, it was a very productive meeting. I didn’t do any coding. Not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing yet 😂.