Stop Yawning! BoringStudent launches first Beta

The other day a very quiet launch happened. It’s a project that’s been going on for a while called BoringStudent. The site, www.boringstudent.com, aims to be the definitive resource for anyone contemplating Higher Education or University and is aimed specifically at 16-19 year old students.

How will it do it? Good question. The site focuses on 3 core strands:

1. Honest & reputable University & College reviews. There are lots of sites out there giving thought and opinion on Universities and students can now use Facebook to connect with people and directly ask questions but rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, we’re going to take the wheel and add lots of nice, useful things.
2. Advice, information, thought and comment. BoringStudent will have a clear editorial voice. Aside from telling students what it’s really like in halls, how to ace your personal statement, what the UCAS process is all about, how to get through an admissions interview, we will also provide relevant editorial that goes beyond the facts and challenges prospective students views on higher education. We’ve called this area Total BS. D’ya get the irony?
3. High quality production values. There are so many student sites out there but apart from a select few, they lack production values. We’ve a team of strong, highly professional, ex-students who are committed at delivering the best stuff out there for people considering University or College. Already we’ve produced loads of professionally produced videos showing what student life is really like, being a fly on the wall in halls and following the angst of A Level results day to name but a few.

Wrapping around this student-focused information is a bubble of interactivity. Users will be able to find people looking to go to the same University as them, share their UCAS Personal Statement (but, of course, not copy them!), ask the questions they’re too afraid to ask about Universities and generally have fun interacting with the site and each other.

It’s genuinely exciting for me to be part of this project. The people working on it are really committed to the best and I think that always makes work seem more enjoyable, doesn’t it? We’re very lucky to have the ex University of the Arts Student Union President for two years running heading up editorial and University relations and a fantastically talented video producer overseeing all our video content.

The site is in beta and there will be lots of significant developments over the next few times. If you have a few minutes, check out the site at www.boringstudent.com and let me know what you think!

Speed Pitching at MyLongLunch

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a MyLongLunch event but unlike my previous visits to these events, I was actually presenting. If you don’t know what a MyLongLunch event is (and no, it’s not some sort of Ready Steady Cook thing) it’s a networking event for people working in the recruitment advertising industry and those who are trying to court them. Roughly 15 media publications (websites, newspapers, magazines) meet 15+ recruitment advertising agencies and get 10 minutes to talk about their business and what’s cool about it. It’s such a great idea as the media publications attending would never get the chance to pitch to this manay agencies in one day otherwise. The events take place in a pub, so though there’s a real and genuine opportunity to do business, the fact it’s in a relaxed atmosphere takes the edge off things.

Those representing the media rock up with laptops, handouts, bags, sweets, CDs, books, pens, memory cards, tins of mints – anything that might help the agency remember who they are on Friday morning – and set themselevs up at a table. The agencies are then all seated with a media representative who then has just 10 minutes to try and tell them why their publication is the perfect solution. I’ve never been speed dating but I imagine this is just what it’s like. We went representing Boring Student. Though the site hasn’t launched yet we felt that we had a very interesting propositiong for people attending this Graduate themed event. All of the other media there were very much focused at those alread in university or graduates but we were able to present a case that focused on people who don’t quite know whether University is even right for them. It presented lots of opportunity. The only problem was that 10 minutes never seemed to be enough. Jamie Leonard (@jamieasleonard), the MD of MyLongLunch and time keeper, always seemed to shout out just as we got to the interesting bit.

Aside from being a great chance to meet lots of new people it’s also a great way to hone your presentational skills. Meeting in excess of 15 different businesses in a few hours ment that by the end of it I found the presentation we started with was about 10% of the presentation we finsihed with.

If you get the chance to attend one of these events, do. www.mylonglunch.com/events

picture source: flickr – lwr

MyLongLunch Officially Launched!

Today was a great day for everyone at Boring, Acknowledgement and MyLongLunch. The new site launched today and it really rocked. Do I just say rocked? Hmm. Anyway, historically the online operation (er.. that’ll be the site) hasn’t operated as well as the offline operation (that’ll be the events, then) but today has been an example of how the two sides of this successful business will become matched.

The site is aimed exclusively at professionals in the recruitment advertising industry (agencies and those working for media publications) and this is only guaranteed by the manual vetting of every single person who signed up for the site. This way, the site retains an air of true community spirit which you experience when attending one of the MyLongLunch events. Too often social networks become overwhelmed with people who, though very interested in the subject matter, can’t contribute and help develop the community.

It contains the stuff you’d expect: user profiles, company profiles, messaging, along with stuff you might be surprised to see: fan pages, blogging for every user and free job posting facilities.

It’s unique proposition is the ability to start a conversation online, move it offline and then bring it back online again. It’s a true online/offline community and everyone who worked on it and subsequently develops it with great content, profiles and pictures should be really proud to be part of it!

Register now for free at mylonglunch.com/register

Capturing user feedback

Being able to discover what users think about your website is essential. The fact that you can solicit feedback across an entire website is something I find very exciting. No, really. What you do with the data is a whole other kettle of fish but it’s that ability to ask a visitor for feedback at any point of your user journey means that, in theory, you’ve lots of useful stuff to help you work on future site iterations.

For the launch of Boring Studnet and MyLongLunch, the plan is to have a horizontal feedback button either on the left or right edge of the site. It will simply read ‘Feedback’ and be visible and clickable from any page on the sites. Clicking it will pop up a little free text box, so that users can provide their thoughts/bugs/ideas throughout the entire site. Sound familiar? Totally, I see it every day on my favourite URL shortening site, bit.ly!

Having development resource means we have the ability to build our own feedback mechanism into our sites but what if you really don’t want to embark on another building mission? Personally I would say that if you can, try and build your own form as that way you capture the info you want but don’t worry if you can’t as there are a few companies out there who will handle site feedback for you at a relatively low cost. Here are a few solutions for website feedback I’ve come across.

Suggestion Box: Suggestion Box isn’t strictly about website feedback but I thought I would mention it as it’s a great way for consumers to suggest improvements to a business or the products and/or services they provide. Though at time of looking at Suggestion Box there were a number of impressive organisations listed, such as Nike, Linkedin and even Obama, it’s not limited to big organisations and anyone can create a Suggestion Box account simply and for free (using their 30-day free trial). There’s a weath of administrative tools and they provide a unique url for you to point users at so they can provide honest and anonymous feedback. Suggestion Box subscription after the free trial starts at a not-too-credit-crunch-friendly $50/month.

Crowd Source: Crowd Source is a site developed by a company called intrideas. Their feedback application appears to work by integrating a widget into your site. This method adopted by Crowd Source has its advantages, as you draw lots of attention to the feedback element and can make it immediately clear to the site visitor what sort of feedback you’re after, along with being able to put the widget on other sites, not just your own. Its disadvantages include possibly not being able to incorporate it onto every single page as there simply isn’t the space on your site, along with having to put up with the Crowd Source widget design and potentially annoy the consumer as it lacks any subtly. Crowd Source offers a free version with some neat features such as spam and profanity filtering or a plus version for about $10/month letting you customise the widget and have SSL security for admins.

User Voice: User Voice is my favourite of the three as it has all the features I like. Firstly the feedback mechanism is simply a small feedback button which sits to the left hand-side of the page, on every page of your site. Secondly User Voice has a nice way of presenting user feedback in tables and allowing you as the site owner to comment on this feedback and make all this public, so people can see you’re listening and making changes (or not making changes but at least listening to their feedback). Thirdly, fourthly and fifthly it just has the edge when it comes to design and usability when compared to the other two, so User Voice gets a big thumbs up from me. Though there is a free version for up to 10,000 contributions, after that the prices do leap to almost $300/month for the never level up, enabling 20,000 active users.

Remember that user feedback is so so very valuable and if you can’t do anything with it visitors will notice this, cease to contribute and eventually cease to visit your site! If you can do something about it, make sure you create a song and dance about this – they need to know about it!

Goodbye Ergh Designs, Hello Users

Boring Student’s design and build process has been a bit all over the shop. We started specing, then designed, then speced a bit more, then did some build, then some more design then called the whole thing off. Well, not quite but we have gone back to the drawing board.

One of our developers back from a week long tech camp the other week came back to the office full of new ideas she wanted to put into practice and it’s really paid off. Her approach was to stop what we’re doing and get back to the user. It’s often the case that when you get so far into a web project, you actually forget who you’re doing it for – the end user. So personal opinion creeps in and, invariably, the product suffers.

You can usually sense the signs. People argue and squabble over minor points (not that we ever argue at Boring, no no no!!), there is little sign of progress, there’s a lack of drive and people seem to lack the excitement they once had.

This interjection couldn’t have happened at a better time!

We spent a few days reminding ourselves who will be using the site. It wasn’t us, though we will use it religiously. And it’s important to make decisions on behalf of the user, rather than as the user. We’ve disgruntled 20 year old lad who really couldn’t be bothered with University, a high-achieving 14 year-old boy who was planing his University before he’d even started GCSEs, a single mum of two kids who’re at secondary school and a few other interesting characters. They’re all now close to my heart as it’s these characters who are reminding me what the site is all about. It’s difficult for a site to serve all users but as long are you are thinking about the users and not yourself, you’re on the right track.

Armed with this breath of fresh air, we’re about to embark on a serious change to the User Interface of the site. This kicked off today with new wire frames and, hoping that Christmas excess doesn’t kick in too early for our designers, we should have some designs by the early part of next week. I’m very excited!

You know when a software project fails when…

Recently I answered a question on Linkedin which asked Finish this sentence. “I knew the software project was doomed when…”

I’d worked on a project back at AOL where the project named changed about three times in as many months so shared my quip. When I was contacted by the questioner to be told I was the top answer and made the first entry in her article on CIO.com, I was pretty pleased.

You can view mine and the 25 other answers, bound to resonate with anyone who’s worked on a software/large scale web project, here.