Gradefix

New Gradefix.com Launched!

2009-03-25T13:44:00.002-06:00

Well, it finally happened! The public beta of the new Gradefix.com is now officially launched. It's been a long time coming, but I think people will find it well worth the wait. The new algorithm is a lot smarter and with this we've responded to almost all of the user feedback and feature requests that have come in over the last couple of years. For the full posting, see our new Code Dojo blog for full details in this post.

Almost There!

2008-09-16T13:54:00.002-06:00

We're finally on the home stretch for releasing the new and improved Gradefix to the general public. It's been available and under construction on our beta site at http://beta.gradefix.com/ for quite a while now as we've been working on it, but we're down to the final stages now. Keep an eye out, and take a look at the beta if you'd like and let us know what you think.

I'm not much of a blogger...

2008-01-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

Some have noticed that there hasn't been much activity lately on this blog, and that is 100% accurate. We've been busy with tasks other than blogging, like building the next version of Gradefix. So yes, we're still around, and we've got some great updates around the corner. So don't judge our inactivity here as inactivity in general... :)

Give Gradefix a try at www.gradefix.com today!

Gradefix.com Organizes Homework - Deseret Morning News, Salt Lake City, Utah

2007-02-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

This morning we showed up in a local newspaper with a great article about what Gradefix can do for students to help them improve grades and test scores, reduce stress, and plan ahead to get a better GPA. In fact, it's already quickly rising through Digg.com:

http://www.digg.com/software/ Cool_software_that_reminds_students_about_projects_and_homework_Gradefix

We'll soon be adding it to our list of Press Reviews on the Gradefix.com home page. The original link to the story is http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,655191900,00.html if you want to go straight there instead of helping Digg the story through the other link.

I'd like to take a moment to briefly thank all our fans and supporters. We've had the opportunity to interact with a lot of great people through our work on Gradefix, and we couldn't be more excited about the rapid growth that Gradefix has been having since it launched just four months ago. We have been reviewed and discussed on a lot of great sites and in print, and we're so happy that other people are as interested in students and better grades as we are. So thank you!

New Web site claims to help students better manage their time, tasks - Press Coverage

2007-01-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

Adrianne DeWeese over at Kansas State University writes for the Collegian there, and interviewed us about Gradefix. She wrote a great article about why a tool like Gradefix can help students get better grades. You can check it out here:

New Web site claims to help students better manage their time, tasks - Kansas State Collegian, by Adrianne DeWeese

It's great when people you don't even know are calling you asking for interviews so they can write articles about something you've worked very hard to build, and luckily for us, it's been happening more and more often. We've been getting a lot of blogs, podcasts, reviews, and newspaper articles written about us lately, and we're happy that more students will be able to find out what Gradefix can do for them.

Striking the Root

2007-01-08T23:20:00.001-07:00

Thoreau said, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." It was a great temptation for us to ignore the scheduling algorithm because of the already good answer we had. To make the matter worse we were not even sure if we could solve the problem like we wanted to. However, Mac Newbold our Chief Software Architect was willing to take a mighty strike to the root and he has come through in shining colors, I cannot praise him enough. Brilliant work Mac!

We faced a lot of challenges in our task of improving the algorithm. To solve the problem we pulled out of our database of schedules and began looking for the schedules in which the old algorithm most poorly scheduled. In the process we found some major obstacles we'd need to solve to make your scheduling better. We tried out a lot of ideas and most didn't go liked we'd hoped, I think it is fair to say the task was daunting. We could have easily done a lot of other things with the time it took to solve this problem; I can say today though it was the right thing to do for you our users. I feel honestly that this improvement has been a major step in taking Gradefix from being good to great and we are proud to release it to you.

Thank you to so many of you for your help with testing, development, ideas, and support. I am always amazed at the caliber of people Gradefix attracts. May you all have a great semester, keep up the good work.

Thanks,
Mark Polson
CEO
Gradefix.com

New and Very Improved

2007-01-08T10:51:00.000-07:00

Well, as Mark mentioned last month, we've been working hard on some major improvements to the algorithm (process) that calculates schedules in Gradefix. It's basically like giving the site a brain transplant or something. Gradefix users will notice a big difference in how much the schedules have improved and how flexible and customizable they are.

One of the major changes is the addition of the Schedule Adjustor. You'll notice it on the bottom left in your Schedule view. Because all students aren't created equal, now each person can individually specify how much work they can do effectively in one sitting. For example, I tend to fall asleep if I try to read a textbook for more than an hour or two, and can only study for an exam for about two hours before my brain is fried. But I can do homework for 4 hours in a row and still be going strong usually. I can now tell Gradefix that, and it will respect that when it makes up my personalized schedule.

This new schedule generator allows a lot more flexibility, so you can control how early you start on your homework, whether you do it in big chunks or little chunks, and how much it is allowed to pack in on a single day. Another feature you'll notice is that it won't have you do work on two different homework assignments for the same class on the same day unless you finish one before you start on the next one.

We granted an early "sneak preview" at today's release to our beta testing team (contact support@gradefix.com if you're interested in joining it) and to a few bloggers who have expressed an interest in our product. In fact, one of them already blogged about our new release:

http://www.centernetworks.com/gradefix-releases-updated-algorithm

You might also see our press release coming to a college newspaper near you within the next week or so.

So to our users: Keep the great feedback coming! We really appreciate it and take you seriously... the features in this release are almost completely user-driven, suggestions from people just like you who were willing to tell us how we can improve the service to be just what you need.

Keep an eye out this term/semester for other important updates to Gradefix.com, including some top-secret features that we think will really knock your socks off!

Gradefix Reloaded

2006-12-08T20:56:00.000-07:00

We have now 200 pages of reviews on our site! Thank you all of you who are teaching us how to make Gradefix an even more powerful tool.

So want do you want? (Top request was)

Smarter scheduling - so we are revamping the algorithms, it is coming along very well.

The Gradefix Labs are busy in production of what you want, get excited.

Thanks

2006-10-14T15:58:00.000-06:00

Over the course of the last few weeks, we have had a flood of new users and a lot of people who have offered to help us. First of all, we want to say thanks for all the help. It is really amazing to me that complete strangers would be so helpful, friendly, and encouraging to us. We hope to return the favor by implementing your ideas and making this site an even more powerful tool for you.

Groups I'd like to thank (in no particular order):

1- Users: the feedback you've given is invaluable.
2- Existing and new beta testers: you are wonderful, responsive, and insightful.
3- Developers: you have been excited to share ideas and collaborate with us (there is some pretty exciting stuff in the pipeline that we look forward to creating with you).
4- Media attention: you have been interested in what we do and willing to share it with the world. Thanks specifically to the Press and blogs.
5- Lastly, our international users: thank you for willing to help us translate our site into your language (Gradefix has established users in 17 countries already, and we look forward to serving you better).

We have developed several updates from all the feedback sent to us and we hope you like them. We realize that we won't be able to make every user completely content, given that there are sometimes conflicting ideas of how Gradefix should work. However, we always aim to improve the site for the largest majority we can.

If we make a change that you don't like for any reason, contact us at support@gradefix.com, and we will see if we can find a way to make it right for you, too.

Best Regards,

Mark & the Gradefix Team

We've been dugg!

2006-10-01T20:04:00.000-06:00

So here I was enjoying my sunday night surf, when much to my surprise one of you submitted us to digg. This is a callout to all you Gradefixers who happen to be diggers... let's see if we can't melt our server, so... digg us!

Thank you SolutionWatch, Thank you Digg!

2006-09-29T21:34:00.000-06:00

Well I never expected such a jump in traffic on our humble little site. Thanks again to Brian at SolutionWatch for mentioning us in his amazing review of web2.0 apps for the student/teacher.

Can you guess which bar is today?

Gradefix review on SolutionWatch.com

2006-09-29T16:31:00.000-06:00

Brian Benzinger blogged today on SolutionWatch.com about online tools for education, school, etc., and mentioned Gradefix as one of his recomended solutions for school organizers. (We're the second item in the first section, with a red arrow next to us.)

There a quite a few great tools on the list, and Brian has done everyone a favor by compiling such an impressive list and trying them all out. Some of those tools are bound to help you do better in school.

Update: This was posted on digg, and recently made the front page.

Students launch Web site to improve grades - News

2006-09-19T14:46:00.000-06:00

Students launch Web site to improve grades - News

Yes, that's an article about Gradefix in the Daily Utah Chronicle, the campus newspaper at the University of Utah. When we come down out of the clouds, we'll say a little more about it.

My Gradefix

2006-09-11T20:43:00.001-06:00

Well, I went back to school again starting this fall. I am working on a Masters of Finance at the University of Utah.

Tonight I got all of my tasks entered for the rest of my semester in "My Gradefix" page. Honestly, It feels great to just see it all organized, really takes a load off my shoulders. I printed out this week and next week schedules it looks completely manageable.

Out into the wild

2006-09-08T11:07:00.000-06:00

This whole idea of launching a project out into the open has been very interesting. I feel like I've let my new robot go and I'm unsure how the world will treat him (or, if he'll short-circuit and not even make it out of the workshop!)

So I figured, it is now time to get out in the blogosphere and introduce him (him being my gradefix-as-robot analogy) around. I spent a while digging into some blog posts about college-related online web products and left a few comments on some of the more interesing posts.

And now what? I wait!

The final moments, the countdown, and the launch

2006-08-30T00:08:00.000-06:00

As midnight approached, we prepared all the final details, then pressed the Big Red Button. Well, really it was just the enter key on my keyboard. But close enough. At the stroke of midnight, in the first seconds of August 30, 2006, Gradefix.com was officially launched.

Then at 12:01, we uploaded the change that made the real home page show up instead of the "Hype" page that was there prior to the launch. And at 12:02, we did a little dance. And after we sleep, the next phase begins...

Feedback is welcome at support@gradefix.com.

Users don't read.

2006-08-29T21:45:00.000-06:00

Anyone involved in any way, shape, or form, in building a web site ought to read this post.

Users don't read.

It doesn't matter how short, concise, funny, pretty, or witty you make it. They just won't read it. You can make it bold, italicized, bold italics, or the ugliest purple you've ever seen, but they still won't read it.

So what do you do?

You have to assume they won't read it, and design an interface that doesn't require any reading. Yeah, it sounds absurd, and it is, kind of, but that's what you have to shoot for. That's one of the reasons why we had to redo Gradefix so many times. You've got to simplify, and go to extreme pains to make sure your interface is as intuitive as possible for as big of an audience as you can target. And the rest, well, they'll either have to read, or find something else. Their loss... ;)

A Sleek User Interface

2006-08-26T14:58:00.000-06:00

We knew that to make Gradefix a success we'd have to have a sleek user interface.

We started with nothing more than a list of the tasks in the beginning and it was obvious very quickly that wasn’t going to work. Next we thought that a calendar-like view should be the way this is made. We started with a sketch like this:

Then we spiffed up this look by adding color:

We thought it would be nice to be able to click on a class and that would light up those tasks. At this point we had made a major step on our think by considering the idea that a task could be added right there on the same page. So I broke up each task into four categories Reading, quiz, assignment, and exam.

There are some downfalls to having such complicated entries for each of these types of tasks, mainly that it would slow inputing tasks too much. However, we thought maybe they could be combined and worked through.

We decided we could save a little space by using color to show which class was related to which task. Then we thought maybe it be sorted even more by combining the task type and the color of the class. So we made these tags.

Combining the tags and and the previous scheduling idea we got this. We thought with the coding that the gray background look was going to be the way to make it clearest, and this was the birth of what I like to call the Windows 3.0 shell.

However, we ran into major problems put in the descriptions in such a sort spaces.

But, we did discover what we started calling the Task Manager, a concise tool for adding tasks. We thought maybe if you click on a class, then the task type, choose a date and put a little note of what to do and we’d have it. The problem was that there wasn’t a space for a little note. So we thought maybe we could have a box open up and it would show the note, something like this.

Well, this was going to be too much work. Come on you don’t want to have to click every task to see the description, that was not realistic. So then we had a major "aha" and thought what if we made a three day view. There were little things we decided to look at like the due tag to save space.

We also added due tags as another space saver.

We started sitting on the three day view. It took care of our task decription problem. In the mean time I started devising the update mode, a place to update the tasks you've done.

With time I started to get bugged by a thought of the three day view, it just didn't feel quite right to me yet. One day it came to me, this is kind of like my email. So I decided I better just lay it out for the heck of it to just see what that would look like (figuring it would suck).

I loved it, but had to let go of the old one, which was hard. It helped that everyone I showed the new email type version to liked it better that turned the tide. The email layout had a major upside of more data in a smaller space, and none of those hidden notes. There was still the question as to how to enter the tasks. So our "Task Manager" idea was revisited, but not without our typical trial and error. The first one here is called the squatty one.

Nope, that wasn’t right. So we made these variations of it.

Our main goal for the task manager was rapid task entry, so we ruled out the drop down bars because they would be too slow. We finally decided on the task bar to the right. Adding the schedule and the task manager yielded:

For sure we thought we had finally found the version we’d be happy with we still tinkered with it to work out the kinks. We decided though it was a nice feature to have the classes up on the top it seemed repetitive so we cut it out.

Update mode would be easier and less confusing if we just used what was there.

Well we decided it was time to go back into production on creating a real version of our windows 3.0 version. So we made it live to see and start testing it out again.

Well after all this work of making this work… I still had one more idea. I woke up on the Fourth of July about 5 am thinking of my windows 3.0 version and I thought "I hate it, I want it to look hip, not old school Windows". The gray bothered me as well as the too many colors problem. I decided maybe the task type could take color then we’d only have to use four colors.

Next I thought maybe we need no color-coding at all and I made this one.

Mac and I liked this one, but Taylor was still a fan of the color-coding. I started to ask around and there was a fan base for the color coded tabs, so I thought maybe we could shorten them down a lot to just the color and one letter as to what type of task it was. So here is the latest and greatest.

This has been our favorite one, so we went back to the drawing board with the programming, and remade it to look like this. In the mean time, we decided that making the background yellow on due dates would save a little more space. Another thing we changed and liked was that all the time was aligned in the same column. When we made this design live, the light blue didn’t look right so we made it dark to match the logo. That brings us to the present version which we feel is getting pretty sleek.

(If you don't have a Gradefix account to log in and see the current one, you can create one or check out some screen shots on the Gradefix home page.)

The Evolution of "My Account"

2006-08-01T20:33:00.000-06:00

We used to call Gradefix "Scholar". These first pictures are Scholar mock-ups that Taylor did to see how many pages we’d need and how they’d hook together. Initially, we thought a person would need to add all their information up front to make it work.

In the mean time, we’d been through trial of finding a designer, getting our logo, and getting a basic layout.

Mac took our designer's look and feel and created this version of Gradefix, around December 2005 and January 2006.

We found there were some problems in this approach, mainly in that we still had no idea how all of this information would fit into the scheduler cleanly. On the input side we also faced one our biggest problems of having tons of inputs. We first thought that the user would need to enter their entire syllabi and this was going to be ridiculous.

On the profile and class pages we started by asking ourselves what was all the info we wanted, instead of what was only the essential inputs we needed.

Because our budget was so small Taylor and I took it upon us to redesign the pages using some of designers best ideas.

When our betas tried the above shown version, they didn’t understand what they were doing or where to click (as much as we thought AJAX was cool, it was hard for people to use at least for our app). My first thought was maybe I should show them a step-by-step bar to let them know where they were at in the process of signing up, so I made this one.

We made sort our own profile and class layout as seen here:

Then we combine these to show where you were to help the user understand the process.

I started to think, I bet we could get this all one page. Here is how it looked.

I was happy about the one page idea, but still didn’t like it yet. It dawned me even after some reduction that we were still asking for too much stuff. We ended up with something like this.

We finally got gutsy and decided to take out even more so we decided to try throw out the class, the section, the department, and the instructor out. Viola!

Now we had a very concise sign up. However, we realized when watching the betas that the horizontal layout wasn’t right. Our betas were much more inclined to work down than horizontally, so we made the form vertical.

When we got to this one and we finally really started feeling right about the look. The side text really helped prompt the user. Our comments from our betas were things such as “simple”, “easy on the eyes”, “not too much information”. Finally, after all that we were happy… well we hope so anyway.

The Right Sharp Tools

2006-06-02T08:15:00.000-06:00

I'm a huge believer in having the right tool for the job. (Yesterday, when I found myself a few dozen sledgehammer swings into the removal of a stubborn old fence, I decided to spend the best $60 of my life. I rented a jackhammer.)

The gradefix dashboard needed cleaner looking task/class tags. Normally, I'd bust out photoshop, but I thought I'd give Pixen a try.

I heard about Pixen from the legendary Makezine.com feed and figured that this was the perfect job for it. I am pleasantly surprised at how swift, easy and intuitive it was to use. I whipped up cleaned up versions of the tags in no time.

Pixen is specifically designed for "small-scale or pixel art", and it shows. I found it particularly useful assigning different tools to the left and right mouse buttons - which cuts down on the palette jockeying. It is an amazing little tool to have, not to mention the fact that it is completely free and open source!

Overall, it felt like using a sharp, nimble hatched compared to the massive broad axe of Photoshop, when all I really needed was to precisely chop a few small branches.

Finding a Designer

2005-12-31T13:00:00.000-07:00

Our next challenge was the design and interface. We starting meeting with designers and thought we found one in August 2005. When we got his contract we started reading, we realized two things: one, this was going to be too expensive, and two, it said he was going to retain all the rights to the design. Retaining rights to the design seemed like a really bad idea, come on, are you going to charge us again down the road for them, madness.

The rights issue kind of freaked me out, so I started learning Illustrator, so designers wouldn’t shackle us again. We still knew that we needed a really good logo and layout and that was when we found Tyler Walseth, in mid-September. This posting could be renamed Mark's hero worship for Tyler's talent. Tyler has been written up in the Wall Street Journal for design work and he is excellent you can see his work on his site at www.212215.com. Tyler came up with a great logo, color scheme, and layout and was willing to give the rights us. We liked his work so much we bought him a video ipod to show our thanks. By the end of October we had a great look, and just needed to get it built. By December we even had our own custom font, the Scantron-ish bubble text font that you see in our logo and elsewhere on the site.

How it all Began

2005-06-15T13:00:00.000-06:00

It all began in college... I (Mark Polson) was going to school at the University of Utah studying business. As hard as I tried, I couldn't really figure out how I could go from being a "B" student to an "A" student. It drove me crazy. I became obsessed with the challenge. Each semester I would try some new strategy, but most of my ideas seemed to have little impact on my GPA. So I started talking to "good students" about what they did, and found they were way ahead on everything, which seemed crazy to me, but whatever they were doing worked, right?

My last semester as an experiment I decided that I was going take every homework assignment, reading, quiz, and test, and estimate the time it would take me to do each. I finally made a great discovery of why I was getting crushed by the school system. I always thought the workload was pretty even, but when I graphed it out, I realized it was terribly unbalanced. I thought back to all the semesters where midterm and finals week were hell and realized this was why. One week I would have five hours of homework and the next week I would have twenty-nine hours. My last semester I was working two jobs and realized that during the insane weeks I would be destroyed. So I spread out the homework from the intense weeks to the easy weeks and voila--that semester I almost got straight "A's". I even had a professor tell me that if he could have he would have given me an "A+". This was truly a different experience for me. Anyway, I thought I better show my best friend Taylor what I had done. Taylor was going through the pre-pharmacology classes like Organic Chemistry, Anatomy, and all of those highly competitive classes. I sat down and worked out Taylor's schedule with him, and again it worked like a charm, he did better in school with this than he had been doing before, which got me really excited. However, Taylor pointed out a major problem with my approach--it needed to be "dynamic" so if he missed an assignment it would automatically adjust the schedule. Regardless of my excel wizardry, this wasn't something I could figure out. As I walked back home to my apartment I thought, “this needs to be an online database that is dynamic”. Taylor and I happened to know a guy that we went to high school with named Mac Newbold that was a genius on online databases using PHP. I called up Taylor and said why don't we see if we could get Mac to do the programming for this. So we met with Mac and he agreed to do the programming, and that was how our team was founded, on June 14, 2005.