Happysandbox was a platform where people could share insights from their own lives, and enrich others. It was a grownups' sandbox where good memories could be built.
Research led me to conclude that we needed the following features: articles, videos, account creation, email verification, like/unlike buttons, social media plug-ins, display error messages, etc. I also wanted to enable users to build their happiness box - a place where they can add their favorite articles and videos.
I sketched wireframes of menus, flow diagrams, basic locations of functionalities and landing pages.
I researched mainstream news and video platforms, then tried to learn what I could and improve upon them. I took screenshots from existing sites and created high fidelity mockups using Photoshop. I had built features like voting (likes), rating, spam reporting - even my own search engine using SQL and MYSQL, which allowed users to view, sort, and select results. Would you believe I wrote a Happysandbox song as well? I did.
I made the site to resemble Youtube and Pinterest early on. I wasn't concerned about looking too much like them at that stage. Back then, my main concern was to make sure all the features were working smoothly and prove the business concept by getting this out there fast. Display changes were to happen later. I wanted this to be an independent platform and really grow big, big, big! So rather than using Youtube, I used a free media player plug-in called JWPlayer. After users loaded videos, the file was then processed using a video converter called ffmpeg to a viewable format and size. I wrote unix shell script to schedule and automate the process.
For initial contents, I hired college students to write articles and upload related images from image libraries I provided. It was an enormous task but I was excited to have built such a website. Traffic was flowing, but unfortunately I didn't adequately do user research.
The enormity of building the entire website from end-to-end stretched me too thin. I did it all: business plan, market research, development, creating the backend database, video creation engine, SEO, marketing, search engine, etc. I didn’t put enough emphasis on user research. It was a good lesson for me. I applied my experience toward other user experience designs and portals that followed.
