PinBot

DESCRIPTION

The idea is simple, curating ideas on the go. Every collaborative process starts with brainstorming a lot of ideas. In this day and age, we don't have to reinvent the wheel but make the best use of available resources. Pinterest hosts a plethora of great ideas but looking at the desktop and mobile app, it can be tricky to collaboratively curate ideas. I think a chat-bot can come in and save the day. Another important aspect is to utilize mundane moments for idea curation like a bus ride can be super useful to curate a board full of ideas.

TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION

Pinbot is chatbot that lives on Facebook's messenger platform. To realize this bot, we had to construct a foundation of the pipeline to connect various platform. Once these platforms start talking to each other, its simple to implement modification and test product re-iteratively. So, what constituted this pipeline?

Inline Text Editor/Atom/Brackets/Textmate: A simple text editor for writing code

Github Desktop: Github hosts the code online. Github has a desktop app which allows us to link local code repository with cloud repository. 

Heroku: Heroku is the server that communicates with the code and pushes it to needful platform server. In Pinbot's case its the facebook servers. 

Facebook Messenger Developer platform: We have to signup with Facebook's developer service in order to use its API. Signing up gives us a unique access token which has to be fed to Heroku for authentication.

Pinterest API/Scraper: In order to use Pinterest API or scraper files, we have to signup with Pinterest's developer services to receive the unique access code. Besides calling API though code, the provided access code has to be fed to Heroku services to make a proper connection.

INSIGHTS [User Testing+Technical Development]

A round of user testing through experience prototyping revealed people really like the random inspiration side of the concept as it felt serendipitous. However, since the experience prototype lacked fully featuring search option, it was rather frustrating for users to use the a product devoid of its main functionality. While user testing keep specific goals in mind and ensure to build an end to end experience for the user. 

For technical development and debugging, keep Heroku logs in mind, it's a wonderful tool. It can point you to specific code-bits with probable errors. Also keep terminal in mind for efficient debugging. An editor like Atom helps you conduct a folder wise search in code which is super helpful in case you are using boilerplates.