Day 26 - If the user can't find it, it doesn't exist
I slept in until 10 this morning. That felt good. My body needed the rest. Working 80 plus hours a week is incredibly tough. It's virtually impossible when you fail to get enough sleep.
For once, I took it fairly easy. I abandoned my idea to build a food truck app because a little more digging revealed that there is in fact already a food truck app that services San Francisco. It's called Trux Map. Instead I spent the day learning about UIView and UIScrollView from the Big Nerd Ranch iOS Programming Guide. I learned that every view is an instance of UIView or one of it's subclasses and that views exist in a hierarchy. They can have subviews and those subviews can have subviews and so on. UIScrollView is a subclass of UIView. They're typically used for views that are larger than the screen. Using a scroll view allows the user to pan, page, scroll, and zoom. I practiced implementing a hierarchy of views as well as scroll views.
I spent the evening at the Ridejoy launch party. I had a lot of fun and met some awesome people. I didn't get a chance to speak with any the founders at length but I really like what they're doing. Ridejoy is making it easy to ride share. They're taking something that could be scary and making it friendly. One way they're doing that is by utilizing facebook as a sort of reputation system. If you login via facebook, you can see if you have any mutual friends with other users, which can help alleviate a lot of the worry about getting in the car with a stranger. Another challenge they had to overcome is matching users up. Simply listing all of the ride share opportunities from a given city would be too overwhelming. And yet the chances of finding a perfect match (two or more people with identical requested departure times and departure/arrival cities) is slim. Thus they had to create an algorithm to match people intelligently.
Of equal importance is the user experience. Visitors need to feel comfortable and trusting of the site because those feelings will carry over to the usage of the service. The flow of the site needs to be such that the user is eased into the process without feeling overwhelmed, lost, or pressured to enter personal information before they're ready. Ridejoy has clearly been designed with all of these things in mind. It makes it easy to look around without signing in. And yet it subtly encourages you to do so with the promise of seeing if you have mutual friends with other users. It's all very well designed.
Congrats to Ridejoy on a successful launch!
