micro360 - progress on my second app

At the beginning of the year - just like every year - I set myself a learning goal. I wanted to learn how to make an app. You can read my struggle to create a 'hello world' app here. Over the past months I've spend some weekends and evenings to make a micro360 app.

What I did

You may have had a 360 degree assessment in your career. They are very popular assessments where you and various categories of anonymous raters (such as bosses, peers, direct reports) rate you on a variety of competencies. Usually these assessments tend to be rather long. So what I've done is created a prototype of a 360 app for just one skill. I took 'listening' as an example because I'm notoriously bad at it myself :-) and because it was the number one identified improvement are for the people participating in LeaderMOOC. The app takes you through a step-by-step process: your motivation to listen better, a self-evaluation, invitation of raters, viewing and interpreting the report, establishing an action plan to improve, and have your raters rate you again three months after. Below are some screenshots.

How I did it (and what I learned)

• As with my original app I made it with appery.io. Over the previous months appery has added support for BootsTrap, Ionic and AngularJS frameworks, but I'm sticking with jQuery as I can't keep spending my time on learning yet another framework and because I absolutely wanted to use the jQuery slidebars for the assessments.
• I incorporated more third party services: the email notifications are done through sendgrid.com. The login is done through social authentication provider auth0.com. I spend quite some time on learning the integration but I'm glad I did.
• I also made up my mind on my favorite javascript libraries: chartJS for charts, momentjs for calculation and formatting of times and dates, StringJS for string manipulation (I especially found their template function handy and I'm using it to customize my messages.)
• Because of the third party components (mostly authentication), I had to set up a web site for my project, so I did that as well. The project is now called 'upping' and the website is http://www.upping.xyz. 

So what?

I'm feeling like I'm slowly getting the hand of programming apps, but every step of the way is still a little adventure. The micro360 app is an app that takes the 360 concept and scales it down to a bite-sized feature with just one skill. But I also am aware that it doesn't really question or go beyond the traditional 360 approach - it does the same but in an app. The only thing I have changed from the traditional approach is that the ratings are on a 1-100% sliding scale and that the 'after-360' is integrated in the same flow.

My thoughts:

• Most 360 applications work with anonymous responses through emails generated by the system. In a time where everyone is a member of some sort of social site (facebook, linkedin etc) would it make more sense to rely completely on these social networks to invite raters (but still keep their scores anonymous)?
• I've tried to tap into the contacts people have on their phone but I'm not 100% pleased with the results. There has to be a better way to use either the phone contacts or the social media contacts to select raters. Also, why do you have to determine beforehand to which category a rater belongs?
• There isn't much support in interpreting the data. Typically this is done in a classroom or through coaching. What kind of e-support can be given to help people make sense of the data?
• The same is true for action planning - the app should probably evolve in an integrated flow from 'insight to action'. 

If you want to test out the app (on android only at this time) let me know.