Fastah : Can somebody good at computers help us?

[Inspired by the The Onion's satirical "NSA: ‘Can Somebody Good At Computers Help Us?’"]

Domlur, Bangalore — Explaining that things weren’t working right and he didn’t know why, visibly frustrated Fastah project creator Siddharth Mathur called a press conference Thursday afternoon to ask if somebody good at computers could help out the project.

“We have this huge ambition to make the mobile internet suck less, I must have done something wrong and now the onboarding flow for the Fastah data manager app is just plain ugly : is there anybody who knows computers that can fix it for us?” said Siddharth, adding that he doesn’t know whether he confused a "user journey" for a "persona" at some point or if he got "a vulnerability”, but would just like somebody to make the Fastah app not scare away all the college kids they talked to in their pre-launch studies.

“I’m no good with this type of stuff, and all I want to do stop Fastah's users from being price-gouged repeatedly by operators. And get control over their phones back from all those wayward apps. Can someone just come by my office and make the problem go away? If people in 80 countries have used it in the last 30 days, we must be on to something really important.”

The engineer also expressed befuddlement that the effort to make a speed map of Bangalore's notoriously sucky 3G/4G speeds was eliciting feedback about "making the circles have lower opacity", letting visitors "toy around" , and "play v/s pause decisions in an animated visualization".

Following the press event, Siddharth reportedly returned to his desk to sit and listen to a Nelly Furtado track once again.

[End of story]

Interesting in making the mobile internet suck less? Send Siddharth an email. Also see our Angel List page .

Keywords: User Experience, UI Development, Software Engineering, Android, Data visualization, Telling stories with data, HTML5, Mapbox, Golang, Machine Learning