What we learnt

Aligning Business & IT requirements

We had to have a good idea of how people shop online, and organize spree. We manage to identify areas of the current spree model which could be improved, from speaking to spree organizers, and from personal experiences in joining and organizing sprees. After which, we analyzed those problems, and brainstormed to come up with suitable IT solutions that could be implemented to tackle those problems.

Managing project requirements

Although we could improve many aspects of the current spree-ing process areas with IT solutions, we are faced with the challange of having limited time to complete this project within the stipulated time frame giving for this IS480 project. Hence, after consulting with or supervisor, we learnt how to manage our project better, by prioritizing the more critical areas to tackle first, which would bring the most substantial benefits to the users.

Exploring new technologies

We would be developing our product using Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a pretty new programming language to most of us, so we would all need to spend some time and effort into mastering it from scratch. Also, in researching on the best IT solutions to implement to tackle the problems identified, we have explored many of the current technologies currently being used to do certain task. For example, we have adopted the Pinterest idea of extracting infomation from websites, and Amazon's Wishlist idea. We innovated,customized and integrated the 2 state-of-the-art technology to develop our core function of extracting product information from merchants site to improve the accuracy of capturing item details and the consolidation of the items into a wishlist for participants with ease..

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Reflections

Team Reflections

We started this project with the intention of starting our own business at the end of the semester.
Throughout these few months, we picked up many valuable tips on how to conduct our user test to get valuable feedback we need in order to make our portal intuitive for users.

Also, our Mentor shared his experience with us, and gave us really useful advice on how to launch our portal.
With all the guidance we received, we really hope that the launch of D2T9 would be successful!

Individual Reflections

Jasmine Chew	Zou Mei	Lau Shu Neng

Project Manager	Secretary	Business Development Executive
It was tough trying to balance the schedule, and new ideas that pop out along the way. Although there were many brilliant ideas that pop up along the way, the role of a PM is to manage the schedule, and prioritize the core functionalities to be completed by the end of this module.	Not having a mentor was rather tough in our decision making process. Our groups had many "arguments" on what is the best way to do things. It was essential that someone in the group had to step in as a neutral party at times, to mitigate the problem, by finding a solution that was agreeable by all parties.	Having experience in conducting and participating in Sprees gave me a good advantage in knowing the problem domain well. However, throughout this project, i have come to realise that what may seem like a common practise in the current industry, is not always the best way to do things. We manage to find flaws and inefficiencies in the process, which came out with ways to hopefully improve the spree-ing process for everyone.

Ryan Lim Wen Rong	Ong Zhen Guang	Yong Qian Hwee

Developer	Developer	UX Director
Due to lack of experience in Spree, it was difficult to fully understand the needs of the spree organizer and spree participants. There are gaps between what the developer and the spree organizer and spree participants wants. Hence, communication between the developer, and people who are familiar with the spree process is essential, in order to fully understand what users require.	As much as we hope to ease the workload of spree organizers and spree participants as much as possible, we are faced with legal limitations that we have to adhere to. We were unable to crawl merchant sites to get certain infomation that could help us eliminate some process. We learnt that some business process cannot be totally revamped, and we had to find ways to work around it.	With help from our supervisor, and much research, i have learnt alot on the importance of designing the site to be easily usable by people. Though it may sound easy, it was in fact a long and arduous process in getting the best design that was easy for people to use and understand through collecting feedback from many user testing. One had to find a good balance between simplifying the content, yet showing all the essential infomation that people would need and having a site with great aesthetics to attract people.