The Hoojah Project
| Project | Hoojah |
| Responsibilities | Research, design and build |
| Technology Stack | HTML, SCSS, Adobe XD, Ruby on Rails, ReactJS, Discourse, Docker |
| Year | 2013-2019 |
| Github Repo | View in Github |
| YouTube Videos | Pitch: Watch video Tutorial (EN): Watch video Tutorial (BM): Watch video |
| Behance | View in Behance |
A platform for Malaysians to engage in structured objective discussions online.
Home page showing timeline view of recently updated polls. Desktop users would be able to see additional information in the left and right sidebars.
The Inefficiency of Online Discussion Platforms
Today Malaysians go to social media platforms and online forums to discuss things that matters to them. It’s hard to keep track of a specific topic on social media platforms because different group of people discuss the same topics separately, hence failed to provide structural opinions and results. While online forum still uses old layout.
Subjective discussions make it hard for people to make decisions and eventually become noises. People need to process those discussion before come up with a point. Open polls is an objective question that could deter the users to discuss the topic subjectively.
And the open poll mechanism, while is created by the discussion initiator and answers are provided to respondents has limited options and could create frustration to the respondents if the answers are not based on their opinion. Having high engagement in the topics doesn’t mean you’re getting a lot out of it. Numbers of engagement could be self-explanatory therefore, the outcome of the discussion is subjective.
These platforms rarely filter out their users, so a user can register multiple accounts and manipulate the discussion.
User profile page showing all participated (and possibly trending or promoted) polls by the user.
Hoojah’s Objective
To become a platform for Malaysians to have structured objective discussions online. Every new arguments posted will be tied to a poll which only has three options: agree, neutral or disagree.
Encourage users to respond to other users’ arguments objectively to promote quality discussions. Thus, encourage ethical online discussion.
Create a trustworthy space in the Internet for Malaysians by verifying user’s identity and eliminate the noises in online discussion environment.
A poll page, illustrating three main interactions a user can engage with a poll. Users can vote, add supporting arguments under each vote option independently of their personal vote, as well as engage in a one-on-one debate with another user.
Moving Forward
The domain hoojah.my has been taken down. However as of the time of writing this, Hoojah is still very much alive, albeit not having any update. The next milestone for Hoojah is to convert the features into plugins for Discourse or WordPress and run Hoojah on top of them. I stumbled upon Discourse while building Hoojah, and it didn’t make sense for me to re-build everything from scratch anymore. WordPress is a very popular solution in Malaysia.
External Resources
Hoojah Tutorial (English) https://youtu.be/1GEy17NS7H4
Hoojah Tutorial (Bahasa Malaysia) https://youtu.be/5MBb-9cCbVs
Hoojah Pitch (Bahasa Malaysia) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfG58Xcgmo4
A one-on-one debate page (seems to be getting good traction, probably because of the two well known public figure debating… interesting stuff).
Analytic page for business tier users.
The log in and sign up feature is combined into a single page. Log in takes priority over sign up, therefore on mobile, the sign up form would be pushed down.
Registered users can create new polls with some options for customization.
Alternative design of user profile page with badges. The idea for badges came from the need to group user interests together, where a badge could be affiliated with user groups, active categories or user achievements.