Hey everyone! This is my fourth post to my IEOR 190E mobile applications class blog page.

This week as we are now a month into the semester, we have finalized our groups. After having gotten to know various people in the course, I have decided that I will be working with Niel, Zach, Riley and Jimmy.

This past week we have been trying to figure out what exactly it is that we want to build. We all decided that we would brainstorm a bit on our own before meeting up to share our ideas and try to decide on a final idea.  I did this first by thinking of issues that frustrate me and of things that could simply be done better and I came up with a few ideas.

I then met up with my team and after some discussion we seem to have narrowed down the multiple ideas that we brought to the table to mostly two ideas. I am looking forward to seeing what our classmates have to say about our ideas as they can hopefully give us some feedback as two which of the two ideas is the most appealing.

That's all from me for this week and you'll be hearing from me soon.

Cheers!

Oliviero

Hey everyone! This is my third post to my IEOR 190e mobile applications blog.

This past week I worked together with Alex, Julia and Riley to build a lego model airplane. We divided the team as such: Julia and I were the architects and Alex and Riley were the engineers.

On Friday Julia and I went to the CET building to receive instructions.  As soon as the task was presented to us, I could already start to see the difficulties that would arise during the assignment. We decided that I was to be the architect who would write the instructions for the engineers and Julia would describe to me to the best of her abilities how she thought the plane was built. The fact that she was restricted to not be able to touch the plane and move it around made the task of figuring out its' blueprint much harder. Personally I found it very challenging to convey into precise step-by-step instructions what the engineers needed to do to build the parts that Julia was describing to me as I myself wasn't even 100% sure what they looked like having never seen the model or any drawings of it.

After a couple of hours I had put together the set of instructions. Unfortunately Julia wasn't able to recognize a lot of the precise lego pieces that were used in the model so the instructions to a few parts of the plane lacked what I considered the necessary detail needed to build the model as Julia saw it.  Nevertheless, hopefully our team of engineers was able to make something out of our work and I am excited to see what they produced today!

That's all for now!
Cheers,

Oliviero

Hi all!  This is the second post to my IEOR 190e blog.

This week I worked with a new team of people that I had never met before: Zach, Tyler, Clare and Ryan.  Our task was to go out and make unusual requests to absolute strangers in an attempt to get your offer both rejected and accepted at least once.  The first thing that came to mind was: "this is going to be awkward" and soon all I was thinking about was what stunts to pull on these innocent by-passers.

I had never done anything like this before in my life, but had seen plenty of videos on the internet of people going around making absurd requests so I was aware that things could take a turn for the better or for the worse very quickly.  This led me to prepare a sort of premeditated script of things to say to people to try to steer them towards the answer that I wanted. I did not expect what was about to happen when we actually took the streets...

What in my mind seemed like unusual and unreasonable requests obviously weren't to the average Berkeley resident as it was SO hard to actually get a rejection! Or maybe I just had a misconception on the things people are willing to do for each other... Either way my premeditated script was not steering people in the direction I wanted it to so I decided to ditch it and just start "going with the flow" approaching people and pointing out things that I thought were odd or fascinating about them and sparking conversation... I learnt that after opening up to people they were both more "compliant" and easier to read. This made the assignment more interesting as I could tell whether the people were leaning towards rejecting or accepting me, and trying to convince them to take the opposite action was what made this fun.

Figuring out smart ways to videotape my team members was probably more challenging than actually talking to the people as the by-passers started looking at me on multiple occasions possibly aware that I was recording them or at least a little bit freaked out that my phone was pointed in their direction. I found that the best ways to take the videos were: to pretended to be taking a call, to sit at a neighbouring table or to simply put the phone with the camera pointing outwards into a shirt pocket.

This was a fun and exciting weekend and am looking forward to what we will be assigned next!
Cheers,

Oliviero

Hi! My name is Oliviero Figus and this is the first post to my IEOR 190e mobile applications class blog!

This week I met with my team members Riley, Laith, Kek and Shao. We decided that the app that we wanted to vivisect was Venmo: a peer-to-peer payment app that is rapidly growing in popularity.

Venmo is special because it enables users to send money to each other using an interface comparable to a text message as well as combining the payments with a small social media.  I assigned myself to analyse the app's design principles as my other group members researched the user-interface, back-end and business model.  I learned that the design is oriented about being "content-first", fast, mobile and trustworthy.  The new venmo design was finalised after having studied a world-leader in application design, apple, and its iOS7 applications. The venmo co-founders want the apps design to evoke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjuRhETwbI0

After having finished research and preparing information to share with each other, we met up again and put together a 5-slide deck to present our findings to the rest of the class.

That's all for now!
Cheers,
Oliviero