Sokanu midpoint internship report by Jorgen Hookham

As time continues to fly by, this report is a good opportunity to stop and reflect on what’s passed and what’s going on.

We’re developing a new feature/product at Sokanu. It’s a way for people to recreate and explore themselves and their career opportunities by creating a narrative using the meaningful experiences in their lives. It’s a personal tool and a social platform; people can compare and connect their narrative to their friends and role models. We’re trying to help people connect their passions to their work—or in other words, get them in to their element. This feature is meant to get people to dive in to what that means to them, and for us to intelligently give them nudges in the right direction.

The data behind the product is structured so that we can perform matching on the back end to make recommendations to users on everything from books they should read, to people they should meet or schools they should attend. Coming up with that data structure has been a challenge. During week three our team of three spent two straight days in a conference room whiteboarding and debating back and forth, breaking down the details of the new feature. Our challenge with the data is taking the vague concept of human experience (can you think of anything more vague?) and distilling it in to something that we can analyze programmatically to make recommendations and perform matching, but to also maintain enough flexibility that the system will work for 90% of use cases.

Since those debates, my focus has been designing and building the user experience. Our design challenge is to build an experience that is self-descriptive, easy to understand, very fun to use and gets people to mentally engage with their path to a passionate, creative future for their career. I’ve been sketching and writing concepts, and building a javascript front end for the feature using backbone.js. It’s a lot of fun, so I’m going to get back to it now.

Tags: Jorgen, Sokanu