The 'Computer Science Project' help thread

[CoffeeFiend]

Hi again.

I never implied or said that ratings or tag clouds would necessarily be a good idea or work in this specific context. They were just examples, or ideas of features you could add to make it stand out from all the other similar apps. It's really up to you to do some brainstorming to find cool, interesting and useful ones. Reasearch similar products (apps used by libraries - google must list like a thousand of them), and see what features they have. Or try some easy survey (drop ballots at your local uni library or city library, asking what features they would like added to the existing software, and also encourage the library's workers to participate too - perhaps even try to do a quick "interview" with 'em, see what matters the most to them?) This is much like the usual "user requirements" part of most software projects - find out what it has to do before anything else.

You could even try "competitor's" software (some of them likely have demos you can download on their websites). See what they're missing, what could be improved, things that are counter-intuitive... Stuff like that. Lots of those I've seen really could have used some simple, task-driven menus for most everyday tasks (at least for the library workers e.g. find a book, batch loans or returns operations, see loan status, etc)

About book ratings... That's *his* way of how ratings should work. Many places just think otherwise (and aren't necessarily wrong by taking that approach either) - like IMDB: anyone can vote anything anytime (feel free to leave votes of "0" or "10" for movies you hate/like). Some votes won't be very representative (there will always be biased people, id-10-t's who totally miss the point and such). But overall, when you have thousands of votes, you can likely get meaningful statistics out of it. (But personally, I think most of the "bookworm" types out there wouldn't really use it. Even if the feature sounds useful, without a good amount of regular "voters" it wouldn't be useful at all). It works for many places (not just IMDB - I've seen that system used many other movie sites, game review sites and what not), but that doesn't mean it'll always work. The tag clouds feature has the same issue - only it's even worse... Likely WAY too tedious to write all kinds of keywords to tag books instead of just entering a number (and much more people are likely to not even understand the system). And those tag clouds system might need filtering/moderation too (to avoid "bad words", which isn't an issue with ratings).

Good luck finding more features, I'm sure you can manage if you spend some time doing the reasearch. Like I said, it's just like the requirements part of pretty much all projects. You'll likely learn a bit too (how the whole process usually works at least)

Talking about IMDB votes, they ought to make it possible to vote zero - anything more than that is too much for miami vice 2006. Go watch plan 9 from outer space or whatever - it just CAN'T be worse! Worst movie EVER (and I'm using the word "movie" loosely here). Now if I could only have that 2 hours of my life back... On a side note, I've cured my chronic insomnia

Edited September 6, 2006 by crahak