Hacking Shindyapin

I was encouraged, if somewhat skeptical, when I read about NIXTY sometime last year. ‘Empowering education for everyone’ sounded too good to be true. Nevertheless, as someone who’s previously wanted to build something similar, I looked forward to this web app existing.

Well, today NIXTY opened up their service for everyone, and I have to admit I’m not disappointed, although I have a few minor usability quibbles (more on those later).

First, a few things I really liked:

• The idea of empowering education for everyone along with having a substantial free component
• Clean layout/design in general
• The ability to mark sections of lessons complete
• Certificates
• Very clever how the first course is intro to NIXTY

Here are the quibbles:

• Use gravatar to automatically select an avatar.
• Why reinvent the wheel with mail, blog, calendar, contacts? I already have a preferred clients/apps for all of those.
• In the course directory, gray out all the categories with no classes in them
• Add a ‘Request Course’ button
• When I’m taking a lesson, enable ‘full-screen’ layout:
  • hide navigation (leave a toggle link)
  • do a dual-pane view: content on the left, notepad (text area) on the right (configurable). 
• Add a next/previous navigation at the bottom of each lesson.
• Marking lesson sections complete should be sent back to the server with AJAX.
• Display threads inline in the lessons (link should toggle discussion thread with AJAX).
• In the spirit of outsourcing other non-core functions:
  • use something like disqus for comments
  • let users embed their portfolio or resume from e.g. JobSpice

Overall, I’m cautiously happy with NIXTY and I’ve started taking a course. More posts forthcoming…