Site and app

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Direction of the site and app

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User personas

User community

• at first, scientists
• in a year, anyone who gives talks and makes slide decks
• don't have to be technically inclined
• almost certainly use existing presentation software
• might expect to use slides they've already made
• might have invested significant effort in getting good at making presentations with existing tools, so a new interface to learn might be off-putting
• feels great after giving really impressive talks - these help progress their career
• excited about compelling new science and being able to communicate it clearly
• many scientists are conservative and don't want to strike out and try new things before they are culturally established, although there's a highly visible subset of the community that behave the opposite way

Building personas

1. Felicity ('Flic') Timken

Flic is 25, a PhD student studying human nutrition at UW-Madison. She's shorter than average - not so much that people think of her as a short person - but enough that it bothers her. She dresses tall to make up for it (e.g. heeled boots - not high heels, more like outdoor boots), and wears her bark blond hair up to make herself look taller. She has three older brothers, and when she was a kid she hated it when people assumed they would look after her, so she developed a bravado that carries her through nerve-wracking situations looking confident, even when she doesn't feel it. Her peers see her as super confident and competent.

Flic lives with 5 other grad students in a shared house. She hangs out with friends from her course sometimes - mostly outdoorsy stuff like hiking and climbing. She's not in a relationship and isn't interested in one while she's studying. She's 3 years into her PhD and no longer takes classes - her research in tocopherols (a type of vitamin E) splits her time between the lab and the computer. She really loves her work and cares about human health. She hates TV doctors and celebs who promote quack nutrition.

She spends a lot of time on twitter and is part of an active crowd there in her field. Last year she entered the Science magazine 'dance your research' competition and got commended, which raised her online profile (went from ~200 to ~800 followers). She's in a few local meetup groups related to her subject and the tools they use, and she gives talks to small audiences there perhaps once a month. She runs a journal club in her department.

Before her PhD she didn't know much about tech, but she's learned R and uses it weekly to analyse her data. If something is hard, she pushes herself harder until she gets it done. She doesn't lose.

UW-Madison doesn't have a great subscription package to the scientific literature which really annoys her. She uses her older brother's login to get some papers (he's a vet met student at U Arizona), and she uses r/scholar to find papers sometimes. She sometimes spends a whole day just looking at memes.

Flic shops mostly on amazon and uses google music for all her listening. Before that she just pirated music.

2. Tony McClelland

Tony is 46, a professor at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology near Zurich. He's a world expert on complex surface sterilization and invented a technique for electrically inactivating non-ionic sufactants that is starting to be used in hospitals worldwide to clean furniture. He has a wife, Hulda, who is Swiss and also a professor (of artificial intelligence at ETH Zurich). Hulda is at a higher pay grade than Tony - he claims to be very proud of this in public, but secretly it irritates him. They have two children, both girls - Freya (6) and Marie (3) who think of him as distant (in contrast to their mum, who is very warm). He speaks German, French and English - he grew up in Liverpool (UK), but left as soon as he could and has fought hard to make sure no trace of that accent is left. He had a motorbike accident in his early 20s that crushed several vertebrae. You wouldn't think it to look at him, but he has chronic nerve pain in his back and takes a bit too much codeine to keep it manageable.

Tony gets invited to talks multiple times a day and has a PA (Anton) who filters his emails so he only sees the most relevant ones. Tony thinks of Anton as a machine. Tony tends to give the same 4 or 5 talks everywhere he goes. He also teaches four courses at two Zurich universities, and does guest teaching around the world. He travels about 6 months of the year for speaking engagements and consulting. Because Hulda is also away a lot (at better-paid talks...), Freya and Marie have a series of au-pairs who live in and take full care of them.

Tony tells himself he's very tech-savvy, but he carefully avoids noticing that his 6-year old daughter is better at using the iPad than him ("why do they design the damn buttons for tiny fingers? It's not like I have fat fingers!"). He has fat fingers. Nothing irritates him more than being made to feel incompetent by computers. "He is not old". In general he gets annoyed a lot, but pushes those feelings down to maintain good relationships - he is terrified of confrontation. Ironically, he tends to shut down confrontational situations by using complicated language to make others feel stupid. He practises things obsessively in private so he only presents a polished, competent exterior in public. People think of him as intimidating, and he likes that. He's vaguely aware of being ashamed of his own incompetence and need to practise so much to appear good.

Creating pathways

Flic

Flic finds out about slidewinder on Twitter. She follows some people in the R scene, and one of them tweeted about it. She took a look at it and liked the idea. She tried out a few searches and built up a collection of figure slides for her research. Then she started searching for R slides and found that there was already a bunch of R collections. At first she wasn't sure about using this for her 'work' talks - so she made a few smaller talks to give at her local meetup groups. Each talk takes her a few minutes to put together and at the events she would mention that she used slidewinder as a way to get social points. She started sharing her talks slide collections on twitter, and using the sharing to build up more online reputation. Some of her R slides became really popular on slidewinder, which got her invited to give more talks. She checks her slidewinder profile every day to see how many views, uses and remixes her slides have had.

Tony

Tony finds out about slidewinder on a plane on the way back from a conference. He is sitting next to two postdoc researchers who are describing it - they had found out from a speaker who used it at the conference. Tony doesn't talk to the postdocs, but it flatters him to think that he could look clever by using it. When he gets home Hulda is away and the children are in bed, so he pours a large glass of wine, pops a couple of codeine and starts exploring slidewinder. He follows through the interactive sequence which explains how to use it. He's surprised to find that it's much easier to use than powerpoint - it's familiar, but somehow it seems more obvious how to do things. He's about to start converting his slides manually, but the site asks him if he'd like to import them, which he does. Again he's pleased to find that the process is easy - he gets his 5 usual talks loaded and is pleased with his collection of slides. He tries assembling a new talk and finds it fun - perhaps for his next talk he'll mix it up a little. Imagine how clever he'd look if he had a whole fresh talk every time! Slidewinder asks him if he'd like to share his slide collection and get credit for it. Reputation does sound good - he allows it, choosing the default license. Next it suggests that he can add a link to his slidewinder profile at the end of his talks to help people reuse his work - he turns this on as the default setting. Next time Tony gives a talk - at a fairly large medical technology conference in Singapore - he's the only one not using powerpoint. He's very proud of this, and has chosen a slightly more edgy theme than he usually would to highlight it. He leaves the final slide on display while he takes questions, and a few people in the audience write down the link to his slidewinder profile.

Translate pathways into specification

• gui should have an interactive walk-through guide
• it must be easy and intuitive to:
  • create slides
  • modify existing slides
  • assemble them into decks
  • find shared slides and collections
  • organise slides and collections
  • import slides from existing decks in standard formats
• users who share things should get detailed feedback about the use of their shared stuff
  • how many people looked (views)
  • how many people added them to collections (collections)
  • how many talks were given that contained her slides (presented)
  • how many people made derivative slides from hers (remixed)
• similarly, these measures should be visible to people browsing or finding slides or collections, so they can for example pick out the most popular slides matching their search query
• should be able to share slides and collections to social media, with images included to appear optimally in streams

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Stack

The CLI and lib are written in Node.js, and given the time constraints Meteor is going to be the fastest route to an app as we can directly use the node packages (since Meteor 1.2).

For the search, we'll want to move to ElasticSearch eventually. But for now vanilla Mongo will do fine - we can use ES to provide search whilst keeping Mongo as the datastore. See e.g.:

• https://github.com/andrewreedy/meteor-elasticsearch
• http://matteodem.github.io/meteor-easy-search/docs/engines/

Backend I'll stick to coffeescript for consistency, and probably jade for templating because it's the coffeescript of templating languages.

Frontend I've recently been using materialize a lot, so for speed I'll stick with it. Easy to migrate to something more custom later if needed. Stylus for custom CSS.

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With the new HTML5 file APIs we can probably do importing, searching remote APIs, etc. on the client side and only transmit parsed files to/from the server:

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/dndfiles/

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Hosting

I'm thinking:

• http://modulus.io to host the app, but because they (a) have performed badly with db admin in the past and (b) only support mondo, I think we should use..
• http://compose.io to host mongo (datastore) + elasticsearch (search index).

Note that the mongo+ES setup is built into compose: https://compose.io/elasticsearch/

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I've also done some route mapping over here