I really like giving credits where they are due. There's a saying that we see the world as we are. I guess I really like to be appreciated for my efforts too!

It's amazing how many people have together to build the Selfi web app so far. I built a nice little page to dedicate it to our contributors. One hope I have is building this into a global platform where psychologists can come together and offer their quizzes to the masses. To that end, I also want to recognise their efforts and contribution in this page.

Before:

To start a quiz, users have to press on the blue boxes. After completion, users earn traits which display on the right. Is there too much noise in here on what a user should do first and do next? I feel like there's too many clickable boxes. Why not make the hierarchy clearer?

After:

The two columns are combined. Not only is the whitespace of the right column removed, the call to action is clearer. Want to unlock a trait? Click on a box to get started on a quiz. Once completed, the trait shows up where the quiz box used to be, creating an association of trait to quiz. Each quiz produces only one trait currently.

I value privacy highly. The ideal Selfi I want to build makes data collection and analytics helpful to people and not hurt their privacy and rights in any way. Eventually, personality data could be decentralized and moved to the hands of users so Selfi does not hold user data. Transparency is very important. Option to opt-in or out is also crucial. It's a step-by-step process.

At this current stage, Selfi is free for use without a user account. However there are scenarios where accounts are necessary: to link people up, for people to view their friends' personality (some people like to keep their personality private, so it must be an option), to prove your identity (possible for job applications). Linking personality data to individuals allow us to analyse data to provide better job connections, relationship matches, and recommendations.

Making sign ups frictionless

I'm currently exploring ways to make sign ups frictionless. We have Google Login and Facebook Login in place to make registrations and logins faster. Currently, I'm exploring where to place and when to trigger Google's One-Tap Login to make registration a one-click process. How it works is this: just press the "Continue as XXX" button and the user is logged in to Selfi.

Should I place this in the landing page? Is it too early to do that?

Should I place this in the login page? It seems a good place to start with.

Or the quizzes page? After users have completed a quiz or two and they might want to explore their friends' profiles.

Returning visitors who have completed at least one quiz

How we do encourage users to sign up? Perhaps by telling them the benefits they can get? I'm a visual person. The below copy that I did for the landing page for users who have attempted one quiz or more - it might not work for me. I want to see things visually. How about an example Profile page with dummy data?

Our Team page

A good team page is a necessity to trust. Who are the people building this platform? Why should I trust them? Selfi is designed with casualness in mind. No formal stuff. Just fun stuff and a place to throw ideas around and learn things about your personality. With that in mind, I want to make us "vulnerable", that we are a new company, that we are just average people, but we aim high and make self-discovery fun and useful.

Selfi is about being vulnerable. Being yourself, not adhering to norms and customs, doing things that you want to do. This vulnerability shows through in each team member's profile description. I specifically asked for less than 30% work-related descriptions and > 70% casual things and hobbies that each team member like. (the descriptions in the screenshot below is not ready yet though)

Yay~ It's been more than 10 months since we pushed a version to production. Today marks the renewal of versioning from v0.01, increasing by 0.01 with every sprint, each spanning 2 weeks.

There are so many journaling tools out there now to help kickstart my work journal. I've shortlisted them to three:

1. Medium – I love the possibility of showcasing my articles to readers there, but the advertisement is really turning me off. I can't help but think there are better ways than to irritatingly block users from reading premium articles after 5 articles. I also dislike being shown premium content 90% of the time which is meaningless if I were to get paywalled anyway. When I'm not blabbering and have unique ideas, I'll probably share them on Medium. Even as a possible way to market Selfi Personal and Corporate.
2. Blogger – I can write as normal on Blogger and pull the blog content from the API for display on my site. There's even an upgraded mobile app now which I can use to post quick entries, reducing the friction of writing spontaneously.
3. Ghost, hosted on my own website – I chose this because it's just easier to manage and it comes with tons of customizations. I also want to own my own content and write anything I want, so it's undoubtedly a winner.

The thought of leaving Mercurics back in early March meant I have to prepare something to show to prospective employers. This means I am going to revive my portfolio website from two years ago. (I've decided to stay because what I really wanted to get started is finally getting the manpower resources I needed) Over the past 2.5 years, how I view design and front-end development has changed with obstacles and successes. Sadly, I didn't document how my views had evolved or degraded. Not that I would have gone back to read all my journal entries though, but it's a good time to sit down and start writing. I'm writing mainly to reflect, record what I've learnt and possibly share them on consolidated entries on Medium. My primary aim is to write better so I can curate content better on Selfi Personal and possibly write articles about Selfi to get it out to the world through readers.

To get started, I have to revive my old, rusty site built to convince prospective employers of my skills. The old site was built with pure HTML, CSS and JS. I took a while to finally get it converted to Gatsby. In those days, I had to code all interactions in pure JS. Transitions, button clicks, splash page animation timing. The frameworks available today sped up development tremendously. It's a boon for the growing number of developers around the world.

Layout is done, CSS almost there. Now I'm finalising the content about Selfi on my website. You know, describe what the project is about, my thought process and so on. A static entry like that is too boring. I want a living documentation. So I'm starting this journal to consolidate my past, current and future work on Selfi. Let the floodgates open. Let's begin. roar