With all the projects that I am working on in the next little while, I did a bit of housekeeping with my Windows 7 superbar to make sure that can still ninja my way around the apps at an unnecessarily efficient pace. I am look at about 4 other app icons in the superbar before it wraps around to the next line. Do you have the same problem too?

The new Quest Student Information System update is no more than atrocious, especially when it took them years to plan for this change. Just from this first page after signing in, I already have issues with it.

• Page title: “Campus-facing registry content” – whatever that means.
• Content title: “Heng-Chun’s Student Center” – there exists something in my PeopleSoft profile called preferred name
• Font size – Gosh! it’s tiny!
• Tabs – Is there something missing in that space? The fixed height is really unnecessary.

Rants continuing after the break.

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I actually have not check this view on my Google Analytics since maybe December, usually I only check the rolling 30-day statistics to see how well my Courselect project is doing. Here is a chart of absolute unique visitors since September 4, 2008 (the inception of the website) up until May 31, 2009.

I am actually really happy to see that the website is getting popular within the school population and no one will ever have to go through the same course look-up hell I went through.

In the last 8 months and a little bit, I went from a hacked up prototype interface through a few revisions to the UI into what is now a recognized self-sustaining website. Of course, I would not have been able to do this without the feedback I’ve had from all of you who read my blog and tried it out as well as the students who left feedback on getsatisfaction or email. I also saw a huge trend from searches of upper year courses down into lower year courses and into subjects other than engineering courses.

Why am I posting this? I just thought it’s friggin crazy manng. Look at the slope on that line!*

Also crazy enough, my original system architecture is still holding up well against the load increase and I haven’t had to make any drastic changes to how any of the component operates or how the data caches work. Crazyness!

*Past performance does not necessarily predict future results

Ah… so we didn’t see the failwhale equivalent on Facebook with a huge chunk of its users all logged in to the website when that time came to stake your claim on your name.

I claimed my piece of the tubes with this as my Facebook URL.

http://www.facebook.com/scott.kuo

I wasn’t lucky enough to claim the holy grail of first name URLs as there’s already a Scott in Facebook’s employee roster.

The new vanity URLs actually doesn’t care about the periods and dashes between the letters so all of these names are the same.

scottkuo

scott-kuo

s.c.o.t.t.k.u.o

Now… I just have to wait another two weeks before I can stake another claim for uwlive since it’s just not popular enough to meet the 1000 fans requirement.

Spotted this on campus on Friday. I’m sure the prof purposely picked that name plate.

Now I remember why I stopped doing freelance work.

The Project IRIS team went out to the OCE Discovery conference on Monday and Tuesday to check out some of the innovations taking place right here in Ontario as well as taking away from valuable information from the conference presentations. We met a lot of interesting people at the conference and learned about their organizations’ business goals.

I think the biggest take away from the conference was learning about business applications of our fourth-year design project that we didn’t originally think of. There’s a company here in Waterloo dealing with federal government land settlement claims that heavily requires aerial imaging of rural areas and currently relies on aerial imaging from airplanes and satellites which are both quite expensive.

On Tuesday, Alex Fefer and I got up at 5 in the morning to drive back to Toronto to attend Clayton Christensen (pictured above), one of the most famous professors at Harvard Business School, talk about his famous Disruptive Innovation framework (detailed in his book Innovator’s Dilemma). His engaging presentation was hands-down the best presentation I have ever attended.

As an aside, the principles of disruptive innovation are exactly what good user experience in any product should be: solving a customer’s problem. Too much of the time software companies focus on asking the customer what the customers want instead of asking the customers what they are trying to do in the process of product design. This often leads to the companies setting the wrong design goals for their software and tools.

Taking the UW Schedule of Classes as a local example, it’s nice to let the students know about the enrollment capacities and restrictions of a course, but when and why do students access the tool? The obvious answer here is that the students are looking for courses to take. Consequently, the issue here is that by hiring the tool, the student is still missing other pieces of the puzzle. Students pick courses on a multitude of qualification factors such as covered material, dependencies to other courses, term offerings, textbook costs, and quality of instructor. By identifying the problem, we can then start thinking about the solution that we are trying to provide, the user interfaces, the underlying software architecture, and the software design. This leads to products that strongly meets the desirability of the market and wipes out the existing players. The new product may be cheaper and also simpler to maintain. So here, UWLive.ca’s Courselect is the obvious winner in the market of 22,000 undergraduate students. Yea… bet you didn’t see that plug coming. lol.

I come home today to find this notice stuck on the garage entrance. The apartment building that I live in is surrounded by ponds and trees. Consequently, there tends to be a lot of geese taking over the private park spaces around here every summer. But a visit with officials from Environment Canada? O’srsly?

I wrote my last final exam for ECON 405 on Friday (the very last day of exams) to finish off the 3B term. It wasn’t a terribly hard exam, although I must say that it was quite long. I’ve been lucky to have a lot of time to study for it over the past week and understood the material very well. As for the other courses, I think I did sufficiently well on those finals. With some chance, I should be seeing an improvement in my GPA again; it probably won’t be as much of a huge gain last term, I’ll take it anyways.

Although that the exams are over, I’m still confined to my room to attend to a crazy fever/flu. I started getting really sick right after my exam for ECON 405 (is that good luck or bad luck? you decide). So all of my plans are now put on hold pending my recovery from the illness. No, I do not have the swine flu even with the symptoms.

Courselect has really taken off this term (5000+ visits/month) with all the independent reviews that have been published in the UW “tubes” and the updates to the interface will be made over the break as usual. I don’t know how much work will be done on Courselect over the short 1 week break, but some features might be bumped to the next release cycle. Performance tweeks will continue to be rolled out to accommodate the brand new project and the significant traffic increase. The project has some security implications that I’ll have to figure out (hopefully with good help from the school administrators). Get ready to be blown away.