Ask HN: Review my side project - UniversityReport
I've been working on it in my spare time for the last few months and it would be good to get some feedback before I unleash it on real users: http://www.universityreport.co.uk
Another problem is that if I pick a course and then have to pick a University it is going to be a long time before I find one with the UCAS score I want, or a certain drop-out rate so I wonder whether a table based view of the universities (once I've chosen a course) might allow me to sort by the fields I am interested in and then click on the interesting University.
Great idea though :)
Letting users search/sort by fields definitely makes sense though. I'll add it to my todo list.
After some further investigation I see you've implemented a decent attempt at solving this problem with the 'similar universities' table (However there is a built in assumption that i can find a university at my academic level. Also as an aside, check your algorithm, Oxford Computer Science is similar to Cambridge CS but not vice versa).
The analytical side of me would still strongly prefer all universities for the selected course ranked in a table, especially if I can reorder the table by metrics as rossj suggests.
1) Why one would want to use your site instead of other sources that are already available? For example, US News and World Report (http://www.usnews.com/sections/education/worlds-best-univers...) or Princeton Review in the states (http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx) have a lot of information about universities.
2) Where do you collect your data from and why should one trust it?
- Are students interviewed or polled somehow?
- Do the Universities cooperate and provide access to their databases or provide the data in some other form?
- Is there a method for students to provide feedback directly and if so how can you verify their enrollment at the university they claim to attend?