Project 4: Deploy

Due Dates

• Deadline: Wednesday, December 3, 11:59am

Overview

Learning Goals

For this lab assignment, you will deploy your social computing system and learn how to evaluate it — and the challenges that come with it. After you've built a system, it is critical to get feedback from potential users to understand what works well and what needs improvement. This lab will give you experience in collecting and analyzing user feedback. In silicon valley, this process is often referred to as "getting out of the building" — going out and talking to real users to understand their needs and how well your system meets those needs. Soliciting feedback early and often is also part of determining product-market fit to determine if there is a real demand for your product.

Because this lab falls over Thanksgiving break, the requirements are lighter than usual. Instead of hosting your project in the cloud, you can just have users access it on a lab computer or your laptop through an SSH tunnel.

Requirements

By the deadline, you should have:

• Have your system completed, deployed, and accessible to users.
• Systematically collect feedback from 12 different people who create an account and use your system.
• Collect additional feedback in lab on Wednesday, December 3.

Submission

• Your Google Drive folder should contain: your feedback form, feedback responses, your interview questions, and your two recorded interviews.

Deployment

— Instead of deploying your system to a cloud service provider (which costs money), you can have users access your system on a lab computer or your laptop through an SSH tunnel.

• For 10% extra credit, you can deploy your system to a cloud service provider such as Heroku, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud. If you choose to do this, please note that costs will not be reimbursed.

Feedback

You will evaluate your system by collecting feedback from potential users. Feedback will be collected in two ways: (1) through a survey with at least 10 people and (2) through interviews with 2 people. You can recruit users from your friends, family, or others. Users cannot be members of your own team or others in the class. (Your classmates will provide additional feedback in lab on Wednesday, December 3.)

Users must create an account and use your system for at least 5-10 minutes. You can help them use the website.

For your survey, create a feedback form using Google Forms (add it to the folder that you shared with me) that has at least four different quantitative questions. Your form should elicit feedback on your website along three different dimensions: (1) user interface quality, (2) ease of use, and (3) features offered compared to existing competition. You can measure these dimensions using a Likert scale. You will need to survey at least 10 people and collect their names and email IDs.

Next interview 2 users after they have used your website. These 2 users can NOT be any of the 10 you recruited to fill in the feedback form. The interview should last for 10-15 minutes and recorded so that you can include quotes in your final presentation. Below is a sample set of questions you could ask, but you will need to come up with at least two additional questions of your own:

• What features of [our platform] are easy to use? Why?
• What features can be improved? How?
• How would you use [our platform] if it were deployed long-term?
• How does [our platform] compare to other, similar ones that you use?

Rubric

Category	Needs Improvement (1)	Good (2)	Excellent (3)
Deployment	Website was not deployed and/or inaccessible.	Website was deployed but certain CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations did not work.	Website was successfully deployed and all operations worked.
Feedback Quantity	Feedback was obtained from fewer than 5 people.	Feedback was obtained from 6 to 9 people.	Feedback was obtained from 10 to 12 people.
Quality of Feedback Form	Feedback form or interview questions were not detailed.	Feedback form or interview questions were somewhat detailed.	Feedback form or interview questions were thorough.
Quality of Feedback Elicited	Did not elicit relevant or detailed feedback.	Elicited somewhat relevant and detailed feedback.	Elicited relevant and detailed feedback.