Rank My Votes Capstone Journey
Where Every Vote Counts
Have you ever wondered if the people writing a review site really know what they’re talking about? Sure, they may be paid professionals who are brought into local cities and towns to give their honest opinions, but they’ve never lived in the area. They’ve never gotten the chance to really know the lay of the land, or to be able to tell the difference between a tourist trap and a local’s watering hole. When you think about it this way, what gives these people any more expertise on a particular city than any average Joe who is just passing through the area?
Enter Rank My Votes.
Rank My Votes is a platform for tourists to hear residents’ voices and discover the best things about Athens, Georgia. The site lets locals of the Classic City vote and rank their favorite experiences that inform tourists of the best niche things in town — something those big agencies like Trip Advisor and Yelp gloss over. We address the problem of not being able to receive reliable reviews by going straight to the source and hearing from the local people.
The Features
User-Generated Content: The entirety of the site is controlled by user uploads. While we prompt a few initial topics to start the ball rolling, the rest is in the hands of the users — however they want the topics and replies to go is up to them. This ties into our philosophy that the locals should be the ones who are having their voices heard as they are the ones who are actually associated and involved with the town so it should be their opinions that run the forefront of the site’s content.
Ranking: Our site includes a voting feature where users will up-vote or down-vote different user replies and essentially, the people’s favorite opinion will be at the top of the replies, while their most disliked thoughts will be buried at the bottom of the heap. All users, whether signed up on the site or not, are given one vote per reply, meaning they are unable to spam like or dislike to manipulate the vote however they see fit. Users will not be required to create a profile to be able to participate in the voting.
Profile Creation: All people who visit the site have the option to create a profile. As mentioned prior, making an account is not required to use the ranking votes part, but if someone wants to participate in the adding of topics and replies then it is a necessity. The profile creation will boost the sense of community on the site as people will be able to put a face to the name and see who is telling them what the best things about Athens are.
Technology Used
With our project being a website, we primarily used WordPress as our main technology. Of course, we were able to customize our theme to our liking with CSS as well as change the layout of our pages using HTML.
We also used a handful of Plug-Ins to our aid. They helped by giving us a way to create a forum board so conversations could take place, a compatible way to use a voting system that live-tallies the votes, a simple to-create profile log-in system, as well as to secure our website from bugs and scammer log-ins.
Changes Along the Way
Our initial logo went through a few changes because the colors were seen as too political or the arrows didn’t seem right, but we eventually were very happy with the final look here.
The alpha stage implemented our major coding onto the site. We found a plug-in family called bbPress that addressed the discussion board (by offering a forum option) and the voting poll (by having a secondary feature that let topics be voted up-or-down on). It allowed us to add an account registration feature as well as an email reply option to let users know if people were responding to their topic.
For our beta version, we updated the color and font themes to what we thought best suited our brand and we removed out a search bar that was acting buggy (but replaced it with a search button in the forum page). We created an about us page that had a FAQ sub-section so that first-time users could quickly understand what we were about as well as make the site very comprehensible when it comes time to vote on your favorite experiences.
Potential Impact
We see Rank My Votes as a budding internet platform that can spread into a variety of college towns. While it is centralized right now, this is a product that has a solid framework and can just be reworded to fit the criteria for other areas. We started with Athens because we both attend UGA, but there’s no reason why visitors would not be interested in learning the niche experiences only regulars know in towns like Tuscaloosa or Gainesville. The possibilities are endless.
The Journey
From where we both started in this program to where we are now has been quite the transformation. Coming into the Capstone, we both had limited knowledge of the world of coding — but what we lacked in knowledge we made up for in a spirit to learn everything there is to know about the subject matter. This website is the culmination of everything we have learned. It is the embodiment of all our hard work, effort, and late nights trying to figure out why the flexbox wouldn’t just go to the middle of the page. With that being said, this is our Capstone journey.
Conor’s Journey: “I’m very happy with how my EM journey has gone. Going into the Capstone, I knew the project was going to be a challenge, but we kept our head down and came out on top at the end. Through hard work and determination, we learned a lot about what it takes to create a site and get it to run properly and that type of experience I’d never trade away. When we started a year ago, we had such a small concept of trying to figure out what the best restaurants in Athens were, and I’m thrilled to say we were able to make a product that solved this problem.”
Juli’s Journey: “When I first joined the EM family, I didn’t know much about coding or really anything when it came to project management or front-end web development and design. Through this program, I have learned so much. Additionally, it is crazy for me to look back over the two years and think about how much I have grown. When I first started this project with Conor over the summer, we barely knew what we wanted to do. To see how far our ideation process has come over the course of three semesters is really something unique. I would say I am really happy with the way my capstone turned out and I feel as if our project will continue to help those moving to Athens in the future.”
Lessons Learned
From the early stages of this project, we’ve picked up on a few things. In our 7013 and 7014 classes we learned there is always room for improvement. Whether it was our font choice or our color scheme, we realized that it’s important to build on what you have to make your product that much better.
In 7012 and 7015, we learned the importance of creating with a purpose. It’s nice to build a website and design it, but if there’s no vision on what type of audience is going to use it and what reasons they’d keep coming back to it, then the project is flawed from the beginning.
So it was no surprise when we learned a big lesson trying to figure out the audience we wanted to target. When we first started we were looking to only target college students. However, after many discussions, we realized that was a poor decision as Athens is not only a college town, but has many families as well. We decided to then not limit our target audience and to try and reach the general population of people who call this city their home.
Once we made this change, we ran a User Testing Report to see what our audience thought of our site and we found the numbers on our study to be satisfactory. Our site left with a grade of 78.21 on the system usability scale, meaning they found the site successful. In other polls: we found that 100% found the site was needed in Athens, 90% found the site easy to use/navigate, and 80% went on to say that they’d use this site weekly.
Testers even went as far to say “I’d use this to find new places to eat all the time” and “I’m shocked this doesn’t already exist”.
Competitive Market
We to were surprised that no one else had conducted a project like this so we ran a Competitive Advantage Report and found while TripAdvisor and Yelp had reviews, they were not designed to have topics voted on and their audience was globalized, while ours is localized. Ranker.com had some similarities in regards to voting, but their food section only cared about big food chains, while our whole purpose is about being centralized to small businesses.
Conor’s Advice
“Make sure you get ahead of your work in this class. Each assignment is a handful, and if you do want to create a product you’re proud of, working in advance is key to a successful finish. Also, don’t stress if you struggle to find a great idea for your Capstone — the important thing is that you start the thinking process. I’ve learned that if you really allow yourself to stretch your creative limits and go outside your comfort zone, some of the best concepts lie just on the other side.”
Juli’s Advice
“Don’t do these projects alone. There is a lot of work to be done and all of it is a lot easier when you get to break it up as a team. I would highly recommend that you join a team or at least do it with someone else so that the burden of completing this capstone is not on your shoulders alone. Another piece of advice I would give is to reach out and make friends with your cohort! They are the people who are going through the same journey as you and it is a lot more fun when you have friends.”
To learn more and see what our project is about, click the links below!
Website Address: https://rankmyvotes.com/
NMI Address: https://projects.nmi.cool/2023/em/rankmyvotes/