Sowiz: Startup Plan for a Meeting Organizer App
This is a startup project extending from a Business Plan Competition organized by Chinese Youth Development Program at Columbia University in the City of New York.
Team Member
Xin Liang | Zhengyi Qi | Aaron Yin | Xingxin Yu | Yusi Zhao
My Role
UX Research; UI Design; Requirement Engineering
Methods
Questionnaires; UI Design; SWOT Analysis
I Learned
Teamwork; Startup Knowledge
Kickoff
The startup proposal of Sowiz arises from several major problems that college students like us would come across in the social activities organizing. The problems can be summarized in the following three categories:
- Difficult to coordinate. When it deals with people more than 5, it would be time-consuming to coordinate the time or activities manually.
- Bothersome to recommend. As most the groups are on WeChat which lacks recommendation on social activities, it’s trivial to recommend a place to friends via webpage sharing or through other apps.
According to these problems, we hope to create a platform called Sowiz, which offer solutions on social activities, optimize the meeting decision process, and fulfill people’s need to record and share social experience.
Research
Questionnaires
We distributed 108 questionnaires through our personal network to collect information on college students’ habits on planning, organizing, and experiencing social activities.
We collected the questionnaires and analyzed the results with Excel. The major insights from the diagrams are as follows.
Nearly half of the investigated people meet with friends once per month (pink). About 30% of the people socialize more than one times a month (dark blue and green). This diagram suggests that college students could be target user group for our product.
The major groups that the investigated people meet with are friends, roommates, partners, or colleagues.
Almost 40% of the people considered the meeting time is difficult to settle down. And then the meeting locations, activities, how to navigate to the location follow as the common problems.
Most people uses groups features on WeChat at that time. And phones, face-to-face discussion, short message to a group comes next. However, the application on meeting is not yet considered a way, which means we could work on opening up this method.
Competitor Analysis
The two major competitors of Sowiz would be WeChat and Dianping.com.
From the data analysis, we can see the major method to organize a social meeting is through a group chatroom on WeChat. However, according to the literature review, we found that WeChat users also want to use the app less as it takes up too much time and sometimes useless.
Reasons why people want to use social apps less
Compared to Sowiz, WeChat can help a group of people discuss on organizing a social meeting and have an enormous user base.
However, it cannot help scheduling a meeting time efficiently. Neither can it recommend a popular or ongoing activities. Meanwhile, it cannot record the meeting agenda, and it cannot help split the expenses within a group after the meeting.
Dianping.com
What Dianping.com can do is that it can recommend various types of social activities and popular locations in the city sometimes with groups, but it didn’t provide organizing features of meeting or users who are friends generally won’t discuss on that platform.
Based on our research, we decided to envision Sowiz as a social tool and information platform, which can provide a one-stop service for planning a social activity.
Ideation
Major User Type:
According to our envision of Sowiz from the research phase, we decided on two user types of Sowiz:
- College Students and Professionals in their 20s and 30s
- Business who target college students and young professionals as their user groups.
Scenarios:
Surrounding the design problems, we proposed 4 scenarios:
- When organizing a meeting, you can schedule a meeting within the group efficiently.
- When discussing on social activities, you can recommend popular ones in the city or nearby.
- After the social activities, you can use Sowiz to split the costs if necessary.
- Users can browse the images posted by his/her friends, and recheck his/her meeting history.
Solution
Based on the insights and results we analyzed from the user research and existing market research, we prototyped the interface of Sowiz.
UI Design
The user interfaces designed tried to abide by the Android Design Guidelines.
The iOS and website version would be further designed if the startup business plan goes well in the android app execution stage.
The major screens of the Android App are as follows.
Recommend users to use cell number to register, in order to import the contacts information on the phone
For first-time users, they can click on the plus button at the upper-right corner to import the contacts information from the phone and then invite friends to use Sowiz, also they can use the search for the friend’s ID to add him/her. Clicking on the friends profile picture will lead to a private messaging interface with this friend.
Click on the plus button on the upper-right corner, users can invite friends to create a group chatroom. Upon clicking the group profile picture, users will be led to the group chatting interface.
Users can click on the plus button at the input frame to:
1. Schedule the meeting time: the initiator could pick the time slots for others to vote.
2. Recommend a meeting location: the locations will be recommended according to the data analysis on other similar-sized groups
3. Help generate the group meeting message which could be shared to other platforms.
Sowiz team would recommend the ongoing activities and popular merchants in the city. Users can check the basic information of the merchants and they can also share the information to social media.
Users could post images or texts in the feeds screen. They can also like or comment on the posts. The posts can be synced to other social media with accounts linked.
Personal information like meeting agenda, archive, my cards, visitors history, and settings would be on this screen.
Market Plan
- Social Media: Use social media platforms to post multi-media products that could attract our target users. Platforms include WeChat, Instagram, Facebook, Weibo, etc.
- Cooperation: Aim for the communicate our mission, e.g., collaborate with restaurant for a theme party.
- Built-in: Be incorporated to mini-programs on WeChat or make use of the API offered by IT Giants, which will give users more access to our features and marketing.
Reflection
We used the framework of SWOT analysis to reflect on the startup plan.
Strengths
- Sowiz tries to differentiate with the existing products in the market, to provide one-step service for social actives organizing, navigation and wrap-up.
- Intuitive interfaces which caters to users digital habits.
- Provide service both for business and individuals, which could attract more stakeholders to enter the platform.
- Cross-device platform, versions of iOS, android, and web-bases application will be developed for users with different devices.
Weaknesses
- Integrate functions from other applications
- The interface design is mainly for mobile users, the features of the web-based application could be limited.
Opportunities
- Smartphones are popular and mature, the needs for mobile applications are growing
- The social interaction methods and consuming habits are transformed by applications like WeChat.
- Instant messaging and social application is prospective to cooperate with online payment and e-commerce platforms
Threats
- The rival between other mobile application which only provide a part of the our features could be intense
- The alternative or similar applications could immerse while we are developing the application.
Summary
Through this startup business plan competition, I learned much on to organize people around a business idea and solve a problem by leveraging the technology surrounding us in the daily life.
However, when I looked back on this plan after the two-year master program, I think we should have spent more time on the business process analysis by interviewing the potential stakeholders and test the interface with end-users to get insights on iterations. These crucial steps can lead to a more intuitive and viable product than one imagined with less data from the market informed.
