Design System / Sistem Rekabentuk

Hai, hari ini saya nak bercerita tentang Design System atau Sistem Rekabentuk. OK jom kita refer kepada Design System sahaja lah sebab ia lebih common disebut. 

OK apa itu Design System, ia adalah guideline yang sentiasa dikemas kini untuk kegunaan developer dan designer untuk memastikan sistem yang dibangunkan mempunyai look and feel yang konsisten.

Ia juga penting untuk membentuk identiti sesebuah perniagaan.

Design System yang wujud dalam internet:

Polaris oleh Shopify

Garden oleh Zendesk

Fluent UI

Atlassian Design

Apa yang ada dalam Design Sistem ini:

1. Warna

2. Fonts

3. Kompenen Layout

4. Icons / Illustrations / Photographies / Animations

5. Voice and tone / Sounds

Senarai Design Sistem yang ada:

https://component.gallery/design-systems/

Precision in Coding

 When we develop a software project we have to be as much precise as possible. 

OK, what kind of stuff we have to be precise?  

1) Features that being used by your users. 

2) The definition that we use in the code.

Let me go more details:

1) Features that being used by your users

As we sometime don’t really know what user want. 

First of all we all need to do some research.

Start small and measure. Before going really massive on deep feature, we have to measure how often people are using the new feature. This give hint of how important the new feature to the users.

When you can see there more and more users new feature, it’s a good sign to further develop the feature and make it as optimized as possible.

2) The definition that we use in the code.

Well this one is goes deep into your code, your table names, variables and so on.

This should give yourself concise meaning of your code. Not only for you to understand now, let think how would you understand your code in 6-12 months in the future. 

Make the variable concise and understandable is a key for precision in coding.

Hopefully this would be helpful in making you become better in software development.

Happy New Year 2022!!!

Happy New Year 2022! From iReka Soft & Orderla.my

It has been 2 years since the first birth of Orderla on the Internet on Jan 2020. 

Orderla started as a simple order form going to WhatsApp, and it was on the stealth mode for few months. 

But on 2020 there was something happen that WhatsApp commerce got some serious attention. Also because of Covid-19, more and more people need an avenue to sell online.

We escalated the development, and open it for free on March 2020.

Later on we develop the paid version which is the Plus version a month later.

It's the first time we learnt about Stripe on top of few other payment gateways like Billplz, Toyyibpay and Senangpay. Moving forward we also add more payment gateways.

We also learnt more about the Telegram integration, how to make a bot. Now we can support 2 type of Telegram bots, inside the group and also one-to-one.

We dive deeper on the ecommerce sector, which is about fulfilment. We learnt about delivery services like : Send Parcel, EasyParcel and Delyva.

We also learn about utilizing Google Maps, create boundaries use specific Google API to get the distance.

Recently we have in the midst of developing mobile app with integration with build-in printer. 

All-in-all for the 2 years journey was a blast and exhilarating. We will use the result of what we have build until today to bring more useful products in the future.

Building Features based on Use Case

As Orderla moving forward, we are keeping our pace to keep update the Orderla with latest features every month.

We put all the request into our idea box repository.

And see is any thing that we can do immediately that ultimately bring values to our merchants.

And sometimes, many of the ideas is quite hard to materialize because of the complexity.

The more we understand the use case the faster we can plan and build it.

Inspiration from others solutions also give us some insight on how things can be implemented. 

Back to Basic

We have a good news that we are shortlisted to enter an online accelerators for businesses.

So I would like to share what kind of learnings or takeaways from the materials they are provided:

Well, firstly, after I go through the materials, it's so much so like going back to basic, or like flashback to the point of time that Orderla (our SaaS business) was started. 

1. Business Model Canvas (BMC):

This is considered as the universal language on the framework of building a business.

BMC starts from :

i) Value Proposition. What kind of value to you want to server your (ii)

ii) Customer Segment : identify your ideal customer, what are their persona

iii) Channels : how do you deliver your (i) to (ii)

iv) Customer Relationship: how do you let your Customer Segment know you, and how do you maintain the relationship.

v) Revenue Steam: how do you charge your (ii)

vi) Key resources : what is your resources to provide your (i), you must have the advantages on providing goods or services to your (ii) in term of knowledge and networks.

vii) Key partners : who else that you need to partner to make sure you can build up the business. You do not build everything from scratch if needed. You can focus on your USP. 

ix) Cost Structure : what cost do you need to spend in order to provide your (i) and (vi)

2. Go To Market 

We had developed the platform earlier than the pandemic. The idea was to create a simple, free platform the send the order as a message to WhatsApp. At first I even didn't know is anyone would like to use that. It was quite a self-doubt of where it could be.

But, on the other side of the world happen there is also the tool on our pipeline pops up and create such a buzz.

From there, we can be certain that our product pipeline could have the potential users or customers. I started to solidify to make the product in term of UX good enough for user to get on board. 

So to flashback, I used social media, and some social media friends helped in term of introducing the system on the group, and it has some initial users.

Feedback from initial users are critical, and make sure to work on them as early as possible to address the concern. Be grateful that your users reaches to you to talk about their concerns otherwise they just can leave you, without you know a clue why they left.

There is good article about how big apps started:

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-apps-got?

And for Orderla it was slow process, but we also polishing the app so that it can cover the most of the issue with early users.

At first the product is not good enough for everybody. But eventually it can be better overtime and can be on par or better with other players.

3. Marketing 

Marketing is everything in business. Even sometimes, you might did not noticed you do marketing.

It's the heart of your business. 

Marketing not necessarily ads, as you can start as Zero Cost Marketing (ZCM), which might consuming time. 

Your product is also marketing. Are they happy with your product, are they feel proud to share their links?

But eventually when you have enough confident that it's good enough for wider audience than we have to pump some ads budget on Facebook for example.

.

That were 3 points of the things that I just reflect back while I got the material of the accelerator.

It can be refreshing to look back and learn how we got until now.

 

Orderla.my Hits 10,000 Merchant Accounts

Early this month, Orderla.my hit another milestone of we are having 10,000 merchant accounts. 

We would like to say thank you for using this system and also all the technological partners that we have collaborate to make this platform more meaningful.

Maturing the Platform

Orderla has been on business already for more 1 year and half.

We have good tractions from micro, small and medium enterprises in Malaysia. And still grew the market ever since.

However as technological product and service. We faced some internet / technical challenge so far, and quite tough actually when the customers are keep complaining and reports on the support group.

Fortunately, we did go through the challenge fairly well after researching, try and error, seeking advices from our circle. I would emphasize how much circle is important in bringing the right knowledge to solve your problem.

So what was the problems: 

Not Optimizing the Database

Sometime the basic thing, we didn’t realized how much important it is when the database got bigger and not optimizing properly could lead a significant slowdown when fetching the data.

Optimize & Protect Your Base

As a services provided from cloud, we have to know the operational of the cloud / server. 

What we buy from the cloud provider not necessarily what we use. For example when we buy a X GB of RAM, or Y Core of processors, it’s not necessarily we use it. So we actually have to configure our server to make use the resources that we are actually paying for. 

Moreover we also need to protect it from being attacked from the outsider. At least know the basic good practice when managing the server.

Other that, there is another layer, for example from DNS standpoint, that we can protect it via firewall. Not only need to connect with the protection service but actually to enable the right configuration so that it would working properly. And also need to monitor if any regression happened along the way. 

Solving the Issues

Sometime people called it technical debt, even you don’t realize it, when you don’t do it right at first, it doesn’t break anything. But when the situation is on the peak, the issues has been escalated so bad that your customers keep reporting to you and give bad reviews. 

So what I can say here is be careful, realize is anything that is vulnerable that could harm your system. 

Sometime we could be in denial syndrome, saying that it was intermittent or using some not solid reason as an excuse. 

Keep learning, seek advice from experts, treat them right. It’s especially from your circle where you can trust to seek help. 

Slowly, we could find the problems on our side and slowly fixed the issue until we receive no more reports and even praise from our customers.

Moving Forward

Building technological services is really about knowing your tech stack.

Tech stack is not build in matter of days, it took years. Many years to master your subject. When we master it, we can build something faster. Evolve, and do some breakthrough along the way. That’s what the competitive advantage that we have in this scene. 

And lastly just want to say that we are always motivated to build what people want, and of course more motivated when people are willing to pay, better pay more on certain things that we build that could help them in solving their problems.