March 26, 2008

New OU Facebook App - My OU Story

When we released the first OU Facebook application - Course Profiles - we built it around several core principles:

  1. it should be useful as a personal application;
  2. it should be increasingly useful as a social application as the installed user base increased;
  3. it should encourage social sharing ("virality");
  4. it should be respectful of users' privacy concerns.
One thing we did not design into Course Profiles was a reason for users to visit it on a regular basis. Once courses are added to your profile, you only need to revisit the app to change their status (e.g. change a course from being currently studied to previously studied [note to self - the application could manage this transition itself if it knew the course start and end dates?]). The Study Buddy feature is another 'occasional visit' feature  - that is, finding a study buddy for a course is not necessarily something you want to try to do again and again on a regular basis; even monitoring which friends have declared a course that you have declared is not a feature that makes Course Profiles sticky. The commenting feature might provide a reason for regularly checking the app, but commenting has not really taken off; a much needed redesign of the interface, surfacing some of the functionality hidden in the course actions panel, might improve uptake of the course comments facility, but whilst it's something we have had on the cards for a long time, we haven't pursued it.

Today, we're announcing our second OU Facebook application: My OU Story.

Once again, the application has been designed with the four key principles identified above, as well as another two:

  • the application should be compatible with Course Profiles;
  • the application should encourage users to visit it regularly.
So what exactly is My OU Story? In short, it's an application that allows you to write short posts about particular courses, associate your mood with those posts, and receive supportive feedback from your friends about those posts. A "Mood graph" provides a summary view of your mood over time. A river of news provides a snapshot view of stories that have been posted by other application users, and makes it easy for you to send them supportive comments in return.

The My OU Story app has been put together by the same team that developed Course Profiles (with some additional creative input in the original creative meeting by Ian Roddis [who blogs where???;-)] - Liam has the low down, in part, about the process we went through creating the app.: New Facebook application: My OU Story

As a bit of a tease, here's Stuart's My OU Story screencast - I'll post in a little more detail about various aspects of the app over the next week or two.



As for our aspirations for this app? Well, we'd like to think that it's exploring one possible mechanism for encouraging peer support, though the ability to offer supportive comments/messages to someone who's maybe signaled they're having a hard time on a course; or alternatively, share their success with a congratulatory comment when they're particularly happy with something they've achieved on a course.

If used regularly, correlating mood graphs across users on a course might turn up insights regarding the pacing or difficulty of a course. A couple of things I'm looking out for are 'nodal mood points', where everybody's mood appears to be in synch, (for example, a particularly difficult part of the course might correspond to large numbers of students struggling with a course and finding it hard going), and the distribution of emotional states around assessment time.

It is well known that Google Trends has predictive potential (for example, look at the trend for this search on roses;-), and whilst Google has orders of magnitude more users than we can ever expect for My OU Story, there is an outside possibility that aggregated mood statuses might be predictive of things like assessment dates. (How useful that would be, I'm not sure.... but it might illuminate how far in advance of an assessment students' mood starts to be affected by the impending deadline.)
PS while we're being all emotional, this post by chance shows how emotional status indicators are starting to appear on user feedback forms: Good UI Design: Make It Easy, Show Me You Care

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Posted by ajh59 at March 26, 2008 11:47 PM
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