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Do Me A Solid

Week 2 — Needfinding

— Written by Nathan Lee —

Now that we have an identity, we need an application that will exemplify our values and purpose for existing. As for the question of whether we want to design a website or an app, we chose an app since it seems that it would be more useful that way, and we were partially inspired by many new companies that started with an app, like Uber.

Brainstorming

We spent a lot of time seeing how users would benefit from the app, such as how people pay and are paid. If the system relied on transaction-free favors, users would soon lose interest as it would be based on an individual’s integrity, which we concluded to be unreliable. The problem of having an exchange system or economy was the biggest issue for finalizing this project’s purpose. Every idea we threw out was still based on doing work for another person, but the matter of exchanging real money or digital currency still lingered. We tried to gamify the experience (i.e. using the bees/beehive theme we had initially) with leveling and credits, but that idea fell out. We even tried changing our team name to suit the appeal, but that fell out, too; this at least expanded our scope for ideas by paying attention to what, for example, our website address would be and how memorable it is. When we got stuck, we listed what services people could offer for others, as seen here:

These categories were later used for our survey

Much of this played into our logo designing process as well, and when we decided to just name our app “Solid,” we settled to let users decide on how they’ll pay the person serving them, and to market this app to UCSD college students, at least initially to screen the local population. They will be the main target group for being able to find and receive jobs from each other; of course, we want to include other demographics too, but for the sake of the project scope, we’re staying local to San Diego. We wanted the system to work both ways, as in both the users offering work and the users finding work can search the local area for jobs. (Otherwise, with users posting jobs in need of work, but not offering work themselves, how will anyone get the work done?)

Surveys and Similar Apps

Now, we moved on to surveying actual people to gauge interest.

Our research upon a random sample of the UCSD-affiliated population shows that people would likely hire college students to do menial work for them, and that most UCSD students are willing to do such jobs during the school year for pay. It seems likely that our app would be welcome in a college community.

From here, we conducted personal interviews with a varied sample of potential users, students and non-students alike. There was still a general consensus that people were willing hire a college student, and many had similar values in terms of what good service is to them.

We also made a competitive analysis with similar ideas. We found four apps and sites that seemed most similar or where the users had purposed them to look for help:

TaskRabbit and Agent Anything are the closest matches as similar apps because they were platforms for contracting work. TaskRabbit is already well established, but it’s limited in supported locations and relies on payment by the hour, which removes the aspect of negotiating between a client and contractor — it also does identity and background checks. Agent Anything functions closer to Craigslist but streamlined for college students; however, it runs on random postings like how Craigslist does it and has a partially competitive attitude when it comes to bidding for a job.

Craigslist can be used to ask for help and buy and sell things, among many other things, and it’s all user-generated — little to no moderation. Ideally, it seems trustworthy as long as people communicate with each other, but there are reported incidents where people meeting up for a Craigslist offer were duped, scammed, left waiting for nobody, and even injured or murdered. Not everyone uses Craigslist because of this lack of security, safety, liability, professionalism, and probably worst of all, restrictions. According to users, it’s also very cluttered in terms of the website layout and design, but at least there’s a search feature, though very limited in functionality.

We as UCSD students know for a fact that Free & For Sale has turned from a site used to just post buying and selling offers, to a place where users post almost anything, including reporting lost items and complaining about the campus. Sure, it offers a lot more for the UCSD community, since many students, current and graduated, use it for its original purpose to reach out to other UCSD-affiliated people, but like Craigslist, postings and users can be untrustworthy because people are likely to change their minds or trick people into doing something they don’t want to do. Plus, it’s exclusive to the UCSD community, not to mention that it only exists on Facebook, and it’s cluttered with unsorted posts like on Craigslist; there’s also no search feature, so you have to actively search for what you want.

Our research leads us to create an app that doesn’t have all these limitations or disadvantages, so we want to work hard on a solution through the next step of this project development process: storyboarding! That way, we can get a better idea of how a certain type of user can offer or look for work on our platform, and if conditions are met, we can finally design the user experience. We really want to improve upon other apps’ work with our app, so stay tuned for more progress!