I have built a recommender systems which has tens of thousands of items and their feature descriptions, but no user profiles as of now. I am looking for pointers to approaches that can help me bootstrap the system, so I can do some evaluation. I would appreciate any pointers to papers/applications that have addressed this problem.
How to deal with the cold-start problem depends a lot on your specific application.
An easy way of dealing with the user cold-start problem is to present the new user with random items, or the most popular items, or hand-selected items, and start learning from them.
Another way is to present users with a questionnaire, and then present items to them according to the results. Or you directly show them items/products and let them rate/select the ones they like.
Also note that in web-based system you usually know some things about your users: Which operating system/browser they use, where they (roughly) come from, which language they speak.
All this information can be used.
Papers:
see the Wikipedia article on the topic
My answer to another question on StackOverflow lists some papers for dealing with new items - most of the methods would also be applicable to new users.
Another approach is to select products/items that will help you most for learning about the user. Just out of my head, you can find them by querying Google Scholar for "recommendation" and the terms "decision trees", "active learning", "user cold-start", and so on.
Related
While I found quite some interesting suggestions on this site (the typical WP vs. Joomla) I just couldn't find an answer that could help me get started.
I know this is close to some of the other CMS questions but I'm missing specificities that need answering.
I'm looking for a CMS that can provide me with the following key functionalities, either through minimal programming or additional plugin installations. I'm stating this because it won't be just me, who can program, but also other trainers who are not technically inclined that will handle the site (in the future).
The functionalities I'm looking for:
Schedule management of training
Trainees of the club must check-in before or after the training to proof attendance, thus site must be mobile friendly. This is more proof-of-concept since not everyone has/wants a smartphone.
Each trainee has his own profile that logs said attendance
Possibility to provide feedback on training. For example: give a thumbs up on the last training, give a "yellow card" if the trainee misbehaved, two/three/four and you're prohibited from training ones/twice/thrice.
The attendance allows the trainee to become eligible for the next exam
Schedule management of said exam
Yearly subscription reminders for the trainees and if under-aged required parent information
Management of trainee profiles and subscriptions
Is the above possible through a CMS or is it too specific and will I need to program this myself? Either is fine by me but I'd first like to find out if a CMS can offer this.
I've decided to Go for a custom solution using ReactJS.
There are very good open-source solutions for the admin part and the open/client part is fairly simple so React is perfect for what I want to achieve. Additionally, it also challenges to think differently since I never worked with ReactJS before.
With ReactJS I have a lot of freedom in how I implement the above scenarios while at the same time have a lot of support available online in cause of issues.
I'm searching for a shopping cart or web store framework that supports multiple vendors.
There are many, many shopping cart frameworks out there: that page lists couple of hundred. In spite of the comparisons on that page, supporting multiple vendors isn't a comparison item, probably because it's a rare requirement. Separate to that page I have evaluated a few of what appear to be the top frameworks, and none that I evaluated supported this feature. Which carts would you recommend?
Commercial is okay, although I would prefer open source.
Platform (Windows, Linux, ASP.Net, PHP, Ruby... Minix, Fortran... :)) doesn't matter.
A system
where I manually add vendors who request it (instead of them freely
being able to sign up) is also okay, if there's a store where that's
possible but freely joining up isn't built in yet.
Rationale: I'd like to create an app-store like website. "App store" is a close analogy: it won't sell apps, but it will sell digital goods and I'd like anyone to be able to sell their item on the store. It's this second requirement, multiple vendors selling through the store, that I'm finding hard to satisfy.
I've used multiple shopping cart frameworks (a lot of them broken), and my favorite (which just so happens to support multiple vendors) is PrestaShop. It's free, open source, and suppports all that you asked for. Is this the framework you were looking for?
-JXP
The Wikipedia page you cited lists multiple vendor support as a column in Other Features, along with features that are pertinent to your search.
This question otherwise requires domain knowledge and likely requires multiple answers. The best I can do is offer the bounded set of software that competes directly within this space, at least according to Wikipedia.
The easiest solution for achieving your stated goal of allowing multiple people to sell on your site while exercising fine-grained control of who can and cannot do so is perhaps using WPMU's MarketPress in tandem with BuddyPress or WordPress Multisite. I'm not a die-hard fan of WordPress, per se, but that might be an expedient way for you to get to a minimal viable product and to validate your idea before shelling out the time and/or cash to custom build it from the ground up, and/or labor ad nauseam with tweaking an existing framework. MarketPress is a good plug-in that'll give you many of the features of a full-fledged e-commerce framework... BuddyPress, of course, will allow you to set up individual vendor's with their own sites under your brand. The two work together. More on MarketPress at:
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/e-commerce/installation/
Another alternative is Jimdo's PagePartners. I haven't used it, but it looks intriguing. I like their design sensibilities, and their stated business ethos. This might be a viable option, too. The caveat being: it's not white label. More info about Jimdo's PagePartners here:
http://www.jimdo.com/pagepartner/faq/
Finally, another interesting CMS to explore is SetSeed. I think it'll allow you to launch multiple sites for each vendor via a central hub you control, and will allow you to maintain your branding within each. How, the,n any sort of renumeration would flow back to you for setting up an individual vendor's store would be up to you to figure out... This is a fairly new CMS and it looks like it's evolving smartly and rapidly. If you require some customization of it, to approach more specifically what you ask for, now might be a good time to reach out to the developer...but you might be able to think of an effective way to adapt it for your use right out of the box.
http://setseed.com/multi-site-cms/setseed-hub/
Unfortunately, none of the above is open-source--but, again, the ease by which you could get to a functional site approximating your idea may off-set that drawback. Jimdo is an open-source contributor, however. So, maybe even an e-mail to them might be a fruitful dialogue to begin. If anything, check out each of the above, and it may influence how you search for other solutions, and will at least provide some models in your own thinking or with other developers. The shopping cart is an integrated feature, I believe, in all of the above cases. With regard to giving your vendors the capacity to deliver digital goods (e-books, mp3s, etc.), check out Fetchapp.com. Very cool app. Very easy to set-up...could probably be rolled into one of the above frameworks. The frameworks would handle the issue of individual vendor profiles and/or sub-domains.
I was recently asked by a Team Leader (not mine) if I would be willing to undertake a programming project. The members of his team are currently pre-occupied with other more important projects. I graduated college two years ago, and up until now programming has only been a hobby of mine. Recently I decided that I would like to pursue a career in software development. I accepted his offer so that I can gain some real-world experience and start building a portfolio.
In about an hour I'm scheduled to meet with the Team Leader to discuss the details of what he needs. From a short e-mail exchange with him, I know that the base project is to update an existing ASP.NET form—but I also think there's more to it than that.
Considering that I'd like to eventually put this project in a portfolio, what kinds of notes should I take at the meeting?
Take whatever notes you can that will best help you understand the use cases and the user requirements. Everything else is just technical details that can be figured out later.
I graduated college two years ago, and up until now programming has only been a hobby of mine.
In that case, my suggestion is:
revel in your ignorance.
Make the most of the fact that you know nothing and you're being given an opportunity to learn - abuse the chance to ask as many questions as possible of the Team Leader in question regarding what type of questions you should be asking and how you should be documenting what you learn.
You only get one chance to be ignorant, once you've wasted it you have to spend the rest of your life as a know-it-all; take the chance to enjoy the learning process.
Get a list of people who are the intended users. Talking with them will allow you to flesh out the overview that the Team Leader gives you. It is likely that the intended users have a very different understanding of what the app is supposed to do than the TL does. So you'll likely be going back and forth for a while. It's well worth the effort though because you'll do much less re-coding.
Try to understand that the Team Leader him/herself might not even have all the requirements available right at the beginning. Be prepared to be hunting down people and writing all these requirements down as they come in.
Things will change during development, new problems and new requirements will always be popping up.
Three things:
What: What is the software supposed to do, the more detailed you can manage to get the other person to be, the better.
How: Are there any known constraints? For example, if it has to ask for a telephone number, does it have to validate nationally/internationally/not at all. Does it have to run on Windows 2008/2003/all
Who: Two sides:
Who will answer any questions you'll have, will you setup weekly progress meetings?
Who will use the software, can you get their early input on your prototypes, can you ask them for opinion/requirements?
One thing I've found very helpful is carrying a hard-copy of any existing requirements (use cases, wireframes, whatever) or any other potentially useful information in a 3 ring binder to any project meetings I attend. If the meeting strays off topic or questions about previous discussions or documents come up it is very nice to have the information at your fingertips in a format you can make notes on, pass around the table etc.
As a bonus, I find most people don't carry any documents to meetings, so you'll also end up looking like you are a real go-getter who is always prepared, which is never a bad thing.
Main downside to this is that you'll waste paper if the documents are updated and changed frequently.
Find out the where as well, where are the files you need stored on the network, where is the source control repository for the project, etc.
Since this is your first taste of doing a real world project, please please please make sure you use source control even if you are the only dev on the project. Your co-workers will thank you and you will thank you the first time you need to back out a change that didn't work.
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I'm working in a small company and weeks away from deploying a web-app that will be used a lot. Everyone at one location will have to learn to use it, and although I think it's pretty easy and intuitive I may be biased.
I've written a help guide with plenty of screenshots that's available on every page, but I'll still need to train everyone. What's the best way? How do you take a step back and explain code you've been working on for weeks?
First try to avoid the training:
Perform usability testing to ensure your web app is intuitive. Usability testing is a very important aspect of testing and it is often ignored. How you see your system will probably be very different as how a new user sees your system.
Also add contextual help as often as you can. For example when I hover over a tag in stack overflow, I know exactly what clicking it will do, because it tells me.
Also this may seem obvious, but make sure you link to your documentation from the site itself. People may not think of looking in your documentation unless its right in front of their eyes.
About training documentation:
Try to split up your material into how your users would use the system. I personally like the "trails" option that Sun created for their Java tutorials. In this tutorial you can do several things, and you can chose on which trail you'd like to go.
Support random reads in your help documentation. If they have a task to do in your web app, then they should be able to get help on that without reading a bunch of unrelated content.
Make sure your documentation is searchable.
About actual training sessions:
If you are actually performing training sessions, stay away from explaining anything related to your code at all. You don't need to know about the engine to drive a car.
Try to split up your training sessions into very focused aspects of your system. If you only have 1 training session available to you then just do one specialized use case of your system + the overall description of the system. Refer to the different parts of documentation where they can get help.
Letting the community help itself:
No matter how extensive your documentation is, you'll always have cases that you didn't cover. That's why it's a good idea to have a forum available to all users of the system. Allow them to ask each other questions.
You can review this forum and add content to your documentation as needed.
You could also open up a wiki for the documentation itself, but this is probably not desirable if your user base isn't very large.
Few ideas:
Do you have some canned walk-through scenarios? Don't know if it is applicable for your product, but I built a pretty substantial product a couple years ago and developed some training modules that they'd work through - nothing long, maybe 15 minutes tops for each one.
I put together a slide presentation that hit the highlights to talk about what it does. I would spend about 10 minutes going through the app's highlights to familiarize them with it before doing the hands-on stuff.
People don't tend to read stuff, unfortunately. You could put hours and hours into a help document, and still find that folks simply don't read it or skim over it. That can be frustrating. Expect that answers that are in your guide will be the topic of questions your users will have.
Break up any training you do into manageable chunks. I've been to a full-day training exercise before and the trainer broke it into short pieces and made it easy for me to get the training topic in my head. You don't want to data-dump on them because their eyes will gloss over and you'll lose them.
Ultimately, if your app is highly usable, it should be a piece of cake. If it isn't, you'll find out. You might want to have a few folks you know run through your training ahead of time and give you constructive criticism on it. Better to fix it before the big group is trained. You'll be more confident in the product and the training materials (whatever they are) and you'll likely have a better training experience.
If applicable, provide an online help/wiki/faq for them. Sometimes that is helpful.
Best of luck!
You should really have addressed this issue a lot earlier in the development cycle than you are doing.
In my view the ideal scenario for corporate software is one where the users design their own application and write their own documentation and I always try to strive for this. You should have identified key users early on and designed the system with them (I try to get my users to do basic screen designs and menu layouts in Excel or similar - then I implement that as static pages and review before writing a line of significant code, obviously they won't get the design right first time, but it's your job to guide them - and ideally in a way where they think they came up with the correct design decisions, not you :-) ).
These users should then write the user documentation from this design in parallel with you developing the system. I have never seen help documentation delivered by a IT department/software company used significantly in a corporate setting. Instead what happens is the users will create their own folder of notes and work-arounds and refer to this (in fact if you're ever doing system analysis to replace an existing system finding the 'user-bible' for the old system is a key strategy). Getting the users to write their own documentation up-front simply harnesses what will happen anyway - but this is vastly easier if the users feel they have ownership of the system because they designed it themselves in the first place.
Of course this approach needs commitment and time from your users, but generally it's not that hard a sell. It's trite, but working as a facilitator so the users can develop there own system rather than as a third party to give them a system pretty much guarantees user acceptance.
As you are where you are you're too late to implement all of this, but if you can identify a couple of keen, key, users and get time from them to write their own documentation then that would be a good move. If you can't get even that then you need to identify an evangelist who you can train to be the 'departmental' expert and give them 110% of your energy to support them.
The bottom line is that user acceptance is based on perception, and this does not necessarily correlate with how usable an system actually is. You have to focus on the group psychology of this as much as the reality of the system, which tends to be tricky for developers as we're much more factually based than most people.
I'll be looking into something like this too in the next few months.
In your case, hopefully the UI has already undergone user acceptance testing. You say you work in a small company. Is it possible to get the least tech-savvy person there to try it out? In fact, get them to try it out without any guidance from yourself except for questions they ask. Document the questions and make sure your user-guide answers them.
The main thing for me would be logic and consistency. If the app's workflow relates logically to the task it has been designed to accomplish and the UI is consistent you should be OK.
Create a wiki page to describe the use of your system. Giving edit rights to the users of your system lets the users:
update the documentation to correct any errors in the initial release of documentation,
share any tips on usage they may have found.
share unusual uses for the system that you may not have thought of.
request features.
provide any workarounds they've found while waiting for the new functionality to be implemented.
Try a few users first, one or two in a small company. Mostly watch, help as little as possible. This tells you what needs to be fixed, and it creates an experienced user base - so you are not the "training bottleneck" anymore.
Turn core requirements/use cases/storycards into HowTo / walkthroughs for your documentation.
For a public training, prepare a 10..15 minute presentation (just that, not more!) that covers key concepts that the users absolutely must understand, than show your core walkthroughs. Reserve extra time for questions about how to solve various tasks.
Think as a user, not as a techie: - noone cares if it's a SQL database and you spent a lot of time to get the locking mechanisms right. They do care about "does it slow me down" and "does something bad happen when two people do that at the same time". Our job is to make complicated things look easy.
It may help to put the documentation on the intranet in an editable form - page "comments", or wiki maybe. And/or put up a "error wiki" for error messages and blips - where you or your users can quickly add recomendations, workarounds and reasons for anything that does not go as expected.
Rather then train all those people I have chosen a few superusers (at least one person from each department) and trained them to teach the rest of the employees. It is of course vital that those super users are
well respected in their departments
able to teach
like the application
The easy way to ensure that they like the app is to have them to define the way it should work :-). Since they should work with this app each and every day they are the prime stakeholders, no matter what management states
I am interested in choosing a good structure for an online message board-type application. I will use SO as an example, as I think it's an example that we are all familiar with, but my question is more general; it is about how to achieve the right balance between organization and flexibility in online message boards.
The questions page is a load of random stuff. It moves quickly (some might say, too quickly) and contains a huge number of questions that I'm not interested in.
The idea, I imagine, is that we can use tags to find questions that we're interested in. However, I'm not sure that this works: you can't use tags negatively. I'm not interested in PHP or perl or web development. I want to exclude such posts. But with the tags, I can't.
Although discrete subforums are in a sense less flexible, as they generally force you to pick a category even if a question might fit into two (if SO had, say, areas for "Web Development", "Games development", "Computer Science", "Systems Programming", "Databases", etc. then sure, some people might want to post about developing of web-based games, for example) is it worth sacrificing some of that flexibility in order to make it easier to find the content that you are interested in, and hide the content that you are not interested in?
Is there any way with a pure tagging system to achieve the greater ease of use that subforums provide?
The real problem with subforums comes when you guess wrong about which topics have enough interest to get their own subforums. While some topics end up with their own vibrant subcommunities others end up as empty ghettos, with little activity or feeling of community. Topics that might flourish as occasional subjects in a larger forum end up fragmented among many subforums, none of which has the critical mass of people necessary to have an active, vibrant community.
Though I think that tagging is supperior to grouping, people tend to think hierarchically.
In general it depends on the target group for the forum.
Maybe you can go with a mixture: use tagging and later use tag groups to order to posts. Delicious uses this, for example, and I find it rather helpful.
If you're worried about the divide between specific forums and open tag-based systems, like Stack Overflow, consider making a query system that allows you to do a bit more complex queries than just the AND operator, like here on Stack Overflow.
I cannot make a query here that will give me all questions in .NET, SQL or C#, combined, and that is the biggest irritation I have with the tags. With such a query system, you can create virtual forums at least.
Other than that, I don't really have a good opinion. I like both, and I haven't yet decided which one is best.
The idea, I imagine, is that we can use tags to find questions that we're interested in. However, I'm not sure that this works: you can't use tags negatively. I'm not interested in PHP or perl or web development. I want to exclude such posts. But with the tags, I can't.
While it's currently the case that you can't use tags to hide content, it shouldn't be impossible. Using SO as an example again, there's no reason that a system similar to the ignore function on a forum couldn't be made for the tag system. By adding a right-click context menu or a small "X" link somewhere in the tag display, tags could be marked as ignored. This would also allow the current tag feature to function; Seeing everything (minus your ignore list), or clicking a tag to see only questions with that tag.
Ignored tags could be managed in your profile if you should later develop an interest in PHP or INTERCAL that you lacked before.
The real question is that of performance. In my head it's as simple as replacing a SELECT [stuff] WHERE Tag = 'buffer-overflow' with SELECT [stuff] WHERE Tag NOT IN ('php','offtopic','funny-hat-friday') but I've not put together any DB backed sites that get absolutely pounded on by thousands people.