Ask HN: Please review our redesigned Web App, GradeMate | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review our redesigned Web App, GradeMate

mygrademate.com

38 pointsbiggitybones45 comments

I'm not going to sign up for this unless you tell me what pricing ballpark you are looking at, or give me some guarantee it will always be free.

Do you know the amount of trouble it would be to move an entire school to your system? And what if you come and say $500 a month and then we have to move the entire school back.

That's why I'm not going to sign up - I don't want to enter a bait and switch situation.

Another thing that turns me off is the language - the teachers I deal with are serious people. Smileys, share the love, Sit tight and such things will make the tool seem frivolous to them. The school owners would see this as a toy and not a proper tool for management. You are speaking designer language, not school teacher language.

What about the exams and the result generation for the students? Can't see it in a quick look over.

Thanks Max. Right now it's completely free and not designed to be used as a school wide system. The main purpose is for individual teachers to use it in their classrooms. We wanted to make something that teachers could use to manage all of their course material and eventually view really granular reports on their students' progress as well as use the service to add more collaboration to their classes. We have discussions set up now but are planning to roll out project pages and and public profiles for students.

Hadn't thought as in depth about the language but that's a great point.

You assumption is that teachers are motivated enough to actively seek out ways to make their classrooms better. Hope you've insanely tested that assumption out and you're sure it's true.

And your basis for the contrary assumption is....?

Experience running a private school.

Many schools have a district-wide system in place for this already, which ties the administrative grade records to a "family access" portal where parents and students can see their records.

My kids' schools use the Skyward system. http://www.skyward.com/

A problem you'll have with any district that's already using a system like that is that teachers won't want to double-enter grades and assignments or use two different systems.

I have friends right now who have a similar product that is made for high schools, based out of NYC too actually.

Their website design is terrible, but they know how to sell. 75-80% of the work they do is transferring over data from old systems to their new system and doing training, and as maxklein said its all sold on a school level and requires support and maintenance contracts.

Also, I'm pretty sure most schools require grades to be entered into some sort of common system so report cards can be generated, administrators can see performance, etc. Anything on top of that would necessitate extra data entry wouldn't it?

Could you PM me the name of their website? We figured as much that writing the application conversion stuff would be needed but those are interesting points.

And you're right. additional data entry on assignments would be needed to more granular level analysis. However, we have a few reports we're designing just to run an over-time analysis / student comparison among classmates that don't require additional data.

Beautifully designed, and looks easy to use. Seems to be heavily inspired by Basecamp (which isn't a bad thing).

Two questions:

  - Out of curiosity, how do you make money?

  - How are you marketing it,since grade school teachers are rarely the techie type?

Thanks for the feedback!

Right now the site is completely free and will remain that way for students. The next release will include a variety of improvements aimed at teachers, and we plan to incorporate a freemium model of sorts that allows teachers to use the current feature-set for free for a set number of courses, while paying for unlimited use and the more advanced features.

As for marketing, we plan to meet with a few teachers in the NYC area to get a feel for what they would want / need and then promote it through schools in the area. We feel that teachers are becoming more and more familiar with the feel of web applications, especially those recently into the profession. The key for us is to create supporters out of this demographic and work from there.

You might want add the ability for teachers to share info as part of your premium service. AKA, teachers share the same holidays based on the school etc.

I think that the lack of pricing is a big problem. It's the first thing I was scanning for as soon as I hit the website. For some reason, it almost seems kind of insulting, and I'll tell you why:

Teachers are already quite organized. They already have methods, processes and often software in place for managing most of what you're offering here. Switching to this system from their current system would take an investment of time and effort.

A website with a "we'll tell you the pricing later!" strategy basically sends the message that you think that the service is either so wonderful, or that their current methods of staying organized are so crappy, that it need not matter what the prices are. But the truth is, you should be showing them the prices from the get go so that they can get some kind of immediate register of value in their mind before they proceed to investigate your service.

You can access the demo here: http://www.mygrademate.com/demo

username/password: demo/demo

once you logged in, you can't actually log in again.. so since i logged in as demo, when i go to the login page, i can type in anything and it will take me into the demo account again.

Sorry to nitpick, but it's usually a good idea to link your header logo to your homepage. It's something that a lot of people expect - even if you have a tab that says "Home". Just a small usability thing.

Small point regarding the demo-- I love that it's open and really gives you a feel for the entire product, but you might want to consider making an editable, disposable session for each time someone logs in. For example, one of the assignments I saw was "testicle1", which I doubt you put in, and may put off potential users. Instead of controlling for that sort of input, I'd just have a default recurring demo screen that is editable but not saveable, and gets destroyed once you end your demo session.

That's a good point and definitely going on the to-do list.

Initial thoughts - It looks really nice, very clean and organized compared to most education related software.

It seems like there are a lot of settings that can be updated, but what about just picking good defaults and cleaning up the unnecessary ones all together? For example, why would I want to turn Enable iCal formatted feed for my Calendar. off? Does Enable my RSS feeds for upcoming assignments and tests. do? pull in other RSS feeds, or make my rss feeds available? If it makes mine available, why would I ever want to turn it off? If I have a profile picture, who gets to see it and where is it displayed?

Editing course grades (clicking on the numbers) didn't seem very intuitive to me. It took a little clicking around to realize that I could even update them. Same thing with the Mark as complete button on assignments, it looks like the button is disabled.

Hope that helps, I only took a quick look at the demo so don't take me too seriously.

Thanks mrduncan.. all valid points. Probably best to separate into 'advanced settings' and 'basic', with good defaults selected. As the feature-set grows, the amount of settings will probably grow as well but we'll keep this advice in mind. We want to leave the site as simple as possible while giving the flexibility to power users to customize their experience.

The idea is really good, I really could have used this in college.

However it seems like its trying to do to much thus it is a bit confusing at first.

One thing I found a bit odd is when editing a course, the button at the bottom says, "Edit <course name>"

It seemed as though I had to click that button to edit the course when in fact I was already editing it.

Seems to me it would make much more sense to have that simply say "Save Changes" or something to that effect to be a bit more clear.

What are you using for that help function? That's pretty well done. I like that it shows help relevant to the current page.

I don't really get the reminders. I can't set the date they show up so they're not really that helpful to me.

I made something similar to this as a Facebook application back when I was getting started with stuff. One thing I thought would be awesome would be a Wiki for your course notes that anyone in your class could edit. Probably out of the scope of your project, but I still think it's a good idea :)

I really like the design. It's very clean.

On the Grades page it wasn't immediately obvious to me that the grades fields were textboxes. They have no border or anything to make them look like inputs so I was looking for an "Add a Grade" button.

Also, how do you make money?

The help function uses the osx plugin for simplemodal (jquery plugin). You can get it here: http://www.ericmmartin.com/projects/simplemodal/

Reminders are really just like post it notes right now but we're planning to make them more like SMS reminders and tie in to your assignments soon.

I really like that idea about the course wiki. We're trying to eventually gear this as a collaboration tool for students that fits in perfectly actually.

Right now, we don't make money but once we release more features for teachers will begin to offer it on a freemium model for now, but always open for suggestions :)

Thanks for the link. I took a look and it's a pretty cool plugin. I'd make the animation faster. When I want help, even that .5s delay is frustrating.

For your reminders, maybe you could partner up with a reminder service? Could save you a ton of development time. Maybe get in touch with http://task.fm or http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

Couple of questions.

1. Possible to update through mobile/email/iphone-app/phone-call, do u have plans to do so anytime soon ?

2. * Could you be more clear about your intentions on offering the student account for free.

3. Is all my information exportable (also as spreadsheets etc.), do u have that option right now/plan to do so soon?

4. Possible to check grades with a classmate, but not a teacher(privacy features etc.) and compare ?

5. * Possible to arrange the courses according to semesters/years ?

Also perhaps, a facebook/goog/openid/ etc. login should help convincing students to signup.

Great questions srik..

1. Mobile is a huge item on our to-do list.

2. Students will always have access to a free version of the site to manage their assignments, courses, files, and other aspects of their classes.

3. This is another big task that we'll be developing in the next iteration.

4. There is no current grade sharing as of right now. Students can only see his or her own grades, and teachers can only see grades for their students in the teacher's respective courses.

5. Working on it

Adding third party login support isn't something we've discussed in detail, but it's a great idea and may be incorporated at some point.

I've noticed that sign up page was http only and felt quite uncomfortable.

Found no way to delete my account ;)

Expected something to happen when clicked on calendar at "Upcoming Tests & Assignments" page that welcomed me after sign in

Why "Create a New Course" is asking me for name, and after pressing Create course redirects me to the edit page, why edit page appears on step2?

Clicking on "create course" for the second time after pressing back button I got:

An Error Was Encountered

Error Number: 1062

Duplicate entry 'yaraci64' for key 2

INSERT INTO `gm_courses` (`user_id`, `name`, `email`, `public_code`, `is_public`, `created_on`) VALUES ('3333', 'A', 'yaraci64', 850393, 1, '2010-02-04 16:37:46')

I could not reproduce the issue again, though.

Is the URL it submits to HTTPS?

nope, form action = http://www.mygrademate.com/login/create

Ouch. Looking at the copyright date range, 3 years is long enough to get an SSL cert.

Thanks so much for going through the site in so much detail! Can't find your email in your profile, would you mind shooting us an email at jason@mygrademate.com?

done

upload on empty file causes an error, you can probably check the input value isEmpty($(input).value) before actual upload

* Opinions are my own and not of my employer (I work for a k12 district) *

A couple of problems:

1. Student data is highly confidential. All traffic should run over HTTPS if you are transmitting student names, grades, etc.

2. Passwords must be encrypted, not sent via a simple POST

3. How do you plan on competing with the large gradebook providers? A lot of districts require their schools/teachers to use a centralized system or at least a common gradebook-type system.

One question that comes to mind: does my teacher have to be using it for it to be worthwhile/possible for me to use?

When you say teachers, who are you aiming at? Would it be helpful for a university student? Would it help if I'm in the UK and not the US (aside from perhaps different lingo)?

I don't think who the web application is for is communicated effectively.

Thanks _Lemon_. We designed this to be used both ways - teachers can use it for their classrooms, but students can use it to manage their own grades as well. They even work in tandem, so you could be subscribed to a few courses your teachers set up but also make your own private courses.

This will definitely need to be explained on the homepage / website further, I appreciate the feedback.

Very pretty, I'll give you that.

But it feels like a database. All I'm doing is creating, updating, deleting... CRUD all over the place, and not much else.

Sometimes a database is what people need.

Great job, I'm going to use this when I go back to college this summer. Btw, would it be possible to add email to the reminders section?

Very 37Signals, perhaps a bit to much.

But overall looks good and at least it's clear and concise.

Very nice design. Love the way it was clear to get to your demo. Love it.

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