To quote Ice Cube "Today was a Good Day".

Two big events today: Usability/Pilot with high school seniors at City School and meeting with the School District of Philadelphia's Office of Strategic Partnerships.

Big thanks to the kids at City School who gave us awesome feedback and were a joy to be around.

We learned a ton by watching kids actually use the app. Here are the key learnings: 1. Pushing to Google Calendar - probably a bit of a learning curve for most high schoolers.
2. Pushing to iCal - works on some phones, not on others and is importing html characters. 3. Directions - its confusing after you click 'get my reminders' - there are a lot of buttons and it's not clear which one to push. 4. The Information is good - kids did get into the information and we heard a lot of 'oh yeah, I better do my essays'.

We debriefed and came up with some general direction on where to go next.

1. Push to SMS as the first option instead of google calendar.
2. Rename ical (most folks don't know what ical is).
3. Give the information up front first before the buttons on the second page but also make the buttons clearer about what they do (ah the challenges of mobile development).

The team decided that we are going to think of some solutions and regroup with our top three on Flowdock later today, and also figure out a time when we can all meet together.

We also want to bring in more hackers and will be making pitches at a near future Code for Philly

School District

The School District is investing in helping kids with college accessiblity and is doing a big Naviance push this semester.

Our key take away from the meeting were that we:

1. Should get SMS reminders to work - to work around the google calendar issues.
2. We need to know if we can handle the load should the school district promote YadaGuru to schools. This is a big district, 200K students.

In all, we are so very psyched to get the feedback. The team feels that as an MVP, we have reached our definition of done. We're going to prioritze our next set of work, bring in a few more hackers to helps us, figure out how/if we adjust for load in AWS and reach back out to the school district.