Word of Mouth wordofmouth.algomorph

1. Word of Mouthwordofmouth.algomorph.com Steven Dobek, Gregory Kramida, Jason Corekin

2. The Problem Find a better solution for business networking. Create a better way for businesses to find, partner, and communicate with each other. Focus purely on business to business interaction, with no outside influence. Eventually create a way to rate and review businesses. Would only come from other businesses.

3. Current Solutions • Angie’s List: • What it does: Lets users to post reviews for contracts, small businesses, and doctors. • Where it fails: Users must create an account and log in to view. • Yelp: • What it does: Users can review restaurants with ratings and written reviews. • Where it fails: Focus is only on restaurants.

4. Current Solutions • Google Maps • What it does: helps consumers locate and rate places of interest. • Where it fails: More of a customer tool than a business tool (i.e. no logos, product listings…). • Ryze • What it does: allows the businesses to join or form “groups” (forum-like) • Where it fails: no individual networking – just groups.

5. Our Approach • Let users make a profile for their business, including schedules, location, and product pricing. • Find other businesses using a Google Maps interface. • Partner with the business, and communicate by sending updates and messages.

6. Demo • All yours, Greg!

7. User Test • 8 tasks to perform: 1. Create an account (make up a business if you don’t have one)2. Login with account (sign out if needed).3. Edit user information.4. Create a schedule (leave at least one field closed).5. Add an update.6. View the schedule information and update.7. Go to the map and locate the search option.8. Sign-off.

8. Test Results • 4 users. • Likert Questions: • Asked how the overall experience was. • Average Rating: 4.5 • Asked how useful they thought it was. • Average Rating: 4.5 • Also asked for their thoughts on the features and where they found difficulties.

9. Test Results

10. Test Results – Main Issues • Visibility – Users found it difficult to locate their schedule, update box, and save button. • Mapping – When asked to create an update, most users went to click on the “View Updates” tab, instead of the edit button in their profile. • When creating an account, an icon appeared saying “Bad Address” if the address was only partially entered. • Also, user could not login by hitting the enter key. Had to click the button.

11. Lessons Learned • Bad things happen, and you must adapt (i.e. one of our key members became too ill to work). • Things that seem obvious to us may not be obvious to users. • Trying to work in the same room can make things distracting. • Code reuse is essential. • Coders code in different ways. This can make things challenging when working with each other’s code.