Entering the “Market”
Quotivation Project
The next step we took was to make a deeper research on what exactly other similar sites to ours provided to their users. With this new information we were able to collect the remaining insights we needed to create a site as a whole. We read and translated Chinese sites with the help of Emily and Cassie and we also showed them some Greek sites. Ιn this way we were able to compare and contrast a variety of international reviews and summaries (“bookcases”). We mainly focused on reading the comments and reviews by the users of the sites so that we could gain insight on the “consumer’s” point of view and what was lacking from the market, meaning the other similar sites. Some of the sites we checked were the Chinese https://www.douban.com/ and the Greek http://www.bookia.gr/index.php?action=what2read . After that we validated the idea we already had but enhanced it with the summaries and the thought of making “competitions” that the users could participate in , such as “Vote me”. The concept was that the up loader of the post with the most “votes” of the month would win a book of his/her choice. Another idea came to us after the presentations we did in class. Our classmates with the project named “T-Share” inspired us to create a “book-exchange” program where the users could interact, suggest and borrow books from each other with their own responsibility. The site would work as a “bridge” or platform between them. As much as we wanted this to work we realized that it would be nearly impossible to create it because of the technical and legal issues that came up, such as the fact that we would have to hire a professional programmer to create such a platform, for which we had neither the time nor the money and the legal limitation that obligated us to take responsibility of such transactions between users, especially since personal user information, e.g. address, needed to be included. Even though we couldn’t implement all of our ideas the brainstorming continued and led us to new paths every time.
