Improving the worker-requester communication methods

[dmorina]

The problem

Email and forum are async and things tend to get lost in emails or delayed responses, which results into requesters missing questions from workers or missing some status updates. Also it's a first step towards adding native support for mobile platforms

My proposal

To further improve this, as next step create a minimal mobile app (initially) for the requesters so that we can push notifications to them and provide a summary of their projects, and possibly also enable instant messaging which requires that we enable this on the platform too

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[iceLearn]

I support this idea since this was a long discussed proposal kept coming and and going. I assume since we didnt have a ready platform back then it was not the priority.

I would like to contribute in interaction design and initial design/wireframe of the app. Would like to know how do you think to proceed - do we think only requestor side of it and design and later we evolve to worker side.

I assume more details will be discussed in the Strategy meeting.

[dmorina]

Great!

Yeah, an idea would be to start with the simple views which would exclude task authoring and doing the task (for workers) because they are the most complicated and maybe not so feasible on mobile, so the rest not sure how useful would be for workers, messaging definitely! And as we go adding the rest of the features for a complete app which provides all functionality that the platform provides.

We can discuss in detail in one of the meetings or when things become more concrete where we break it down into small issues for weekly sprints.

[shirishgoyal]

I personally feel this is not the right time to focus on this initiative as there are number of other problems which need to be solved on platform first and initial decision on introducing mobile app was when platform will have significant user population and it being used actively. Probably, we should work on this when new cohort starts or maybe even later.

Also this initiative makes more sense for workers who are struggling to keep in sync when task becomes available to them vs. requesters who are not getting anything new in this interaction (assuming they can see similiar info with responsive web version already)