EclecticGuy

First, I want to thank everyone for their feedback on Shrugh! The response has been great! I’ve been working on the demo (you may have seen several versions of it already) and now have a scripted demo that is reasonably complete. It shows how to create all 3 types of shrughs – Yes/No, List, and Pros & Cons. It also shows how you can tag and add notes to other Shrughie’s shrughs and follow Shrughies that you are interested in. Finally, the demo ends with a Google Form where you can give my your feedback!

May I trouble you one more time to run through the demo and give me your comments? Simply go to www.shrugh.com to get started.

About the Name

The overwhelming majority of you like the name Shrugh and even figured out how to pronounce it! A handful of people couldn’t figure it out, so here is the story on the name:

The name “Shrugh” stems from the concatenation of “shrug” and “ugh” pronounced Shru-ugh. A “shrug” is body language that is often used when a person is confused or indecisive. An “ugh” is an exclamation of “I don’t know” or “this is going to hurt”! Shrugh seemed like as good of a name as any, and the domain name was free and clear!

Demo Details

Many of you asked for more details about the demo itself. Well, as I wrote on my blog “Assembling demos from balsamiq Mockups” I use a product called balsamiq Mockups to design the screens (I blogged about Mockups here). Mockups creates static screens and has the ability to export them as PNG files. So I developed a technique using CSS styles to let me link static screens together to create a demo of sorts. That is how the Shrugh demo works. One handy trick that I just thought of and didn’t mention in either of my updates to the demo technique, is to show the “hotspots” while you are figuring out what their coordinates are. If you use my css source file “selection.css“, you will see a commented out style at the bottom. If you uncomment this style, you will be able to see your hotspots while you work on the demo! Just comment the style out before you present the demo.

Shrugh Demo Lessons Learned

The current Shrugh demo has 43 Mockups PNG screens and 48 HTML wrapper files. You’ll notice that the top of each page has a link to take the user back to the Shrugh Homepage. My friend Bob made that suggestion and it has been well received! I also added a Google Form to collect feedback directly as part of the user’s demo experience. It was very easy to create the form and it tabulates all of the feedback in a spreadsheet so it is easy for me to manage. Finally, I include a short description and explicit directions on what the user is seeing and what they should do next. That has really helped too.

One comment on demos done this way, they do result in more screens and user clicks than the actual product will have. The reason for this is that the PNG files are of a fixed size and trying to kludge vertical scrolling would have been time consuming. So, rather than have a single screen to create a shrugh, it is divided between 4 screens. It will be a simple matter to combine these elements on to a single screen and significantly improve usability. Thanks to all those who commented on this!

What’s Next?

While I’ve been developing the demo, I’ve also been looking at implementation technologies and platforms. I had narrowed it down to two – Ruby on Rails and Google App Engine. They are very different platforms, each with strengths and weaknesses. So, I did a rapid prototype on each to test capabilities and get a feel for them. I developed the same application on each – a simple Yes/No shrugh creation screen that saves the shrugh to a database and displays shrughs in a list. It was actually easy to build this on both technologies but in the end, I chose Google App Engine as the platform of choice for several reasons:

1. It is a new cloud computing platform and I am very intrigued with the future of cloud computing. What better way to learn about it than to actually develop an application for one?
2. Google App Engine currently supports the Python programming language and I already know Python.
3. Google App Engine also supports the Django Web framework. Both Rails and Django support the DRY principle but I really like Django’s URL scheme and templating. (Rails relies on 3rd party modules for more powerful templating, like Liquid).