Friday 30 September 2016

Week 7: Starting the Final Project

Idea Generation


My team kept generating ideas since the weekend, but we couldn't really decide on one.

Some ideas we had were:
- Drag & drop travel planner
   > We usually need to open lots of tabs, apps, to plan one trip -> we want a one-stop solution.

- Anonymous chat where you can reveal your identity
   > Main purpose: make friends once you get familiar
   > Try to get people to reveal their identities

- Location-based social map
   > Something like Habbo Hotel but you get to see users around your location
   > Create your own sprite

Idea Validation: Travel Planner

On Monday, we asked Colin about the first 2 ideas, and he like the travel planner idea. He had felt the same pain we did when planning your own trips.

On Tuesday, we gathered feedback from some of our tutors and realised the tutors felt that the travel planner app would not be a good idea for the final project.

Some reasons they gave were:
1. Scope too big
2. Too many travel apps

I really liked the travel planner idea as I like to plan my own vacations, and I don't usually travel with packaged tours. I would love to have an app like this to solve the pain of having to open Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Sheets and TripAdvisor to plan one trip.

However, I saw their point in that the scope was really too big. During group discussions and user validation, we realised that both us and the users would want a wide range of features in order to make this app a one-stop solution. Within the 5-6 weeks we have to build this final project, it was probably not feasible. Or we would only build a half-baked app in the end. Even if we die trying.

Another Idea: Anonymous Chat

We did a quick poll amongst the team and found that we weren't too convinced about the travel app idea now. After another brainstorming idea, we expanded on the anonymous chat idea and combined it with one of the social causes we had interest in.

We wanted to have a platform where users can find someone to talk to about problems or emotions. We also wanted to make it easy for people to join in, without accounts, and anonymously.

Introducing Bubble

We proposed to have an anonymous chat platform where users could create private one-to-one or public group chats. In the group chats, anyone can join and they can set the topic beforehand. In private chats, they can indicate interests and find a random match to chat with.

However, there are some problems we might face...

- Anonymity => bullying?

As with other anonymous apps, Bubble can be used to bully people, and considering that we're targeting those who have emotional problems, bullies might end up kicking someone who is already down.

We intend to moderate chats and allow people to flag users that act inappropriately.

- Not enough users 

As a chat platform, Bubble needs users to actually chat with.

Following the growth hack talk, we intend to fake it until we make it, going the way of Reddit.

After some googling, I also found a Reddit thread that shows how Dropbox, Quora and Foursquare growth hacked at their start. It shows pretty interesting strategies, and hopefully we'll be able to try them out for our final project.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2clqa3/how_startups_such_as_dropbox_airbnb_groupon_and/

Some Thoughts

As usual, I'll be acting as the designer and frontend dev. After playing around with React in Assignment 3, I'll most likely be returning to Angular and Angular Material for the final project, to play to my strengths and something more familiar to me. After going through the talk on security, I also picked up some tips and will be (hopefully) making it so that the frontend doesn't suffer from XSS. :P

I'm pretty tired after going through midterms this week, but hopefully I can start kicking things off over the weekend!

1 comment:

  1. Haha, great to see the idea on anonymous chat being picked up by your group. I think this is definitely a better approach to execute the idea, without tying it to a particular platform. I image it would something like a mix of Quora, facebook and old-style IRC. Very interesting.

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