Yes or No? Let the App Tell You

Lumos COGS187A
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

Have you ever struggled with tiny decisions? Have you hesitated over choices and wanted to hear others’ voices? I believe most people have similar experiences before. On Tuesday our team decided to build an app that helps people to make decision. In the procedure of drawing personas and storyboards, we came up with situations that may happen in their daily life. On Thursday, our group members introduced our personas and made interesting stories. It is shown that our App will fit for children, families, elders and all kinds of different users.

Let’s look at some stories about how useful our app is!

Storyboard from Xinran Wei

Brian is a 27 years old data analyst. He is always busy working with computers all the time. One day he wants to have a romantic dinner with his girlfriend. However he doesn’t know many restaurants as he’s so busy working. There are so many recommendations from other app and it’s hard to decide. Finally he uses our app to decide a great restaurant after hearing other’s suggestions, and his girlfriend accepts his proposal at dinner! Undoubtedly our app helps him a lot to get a great dinner and a happy fiancee.


Persona and storyboard from Fan Fan

Jennifer is a young girl who just arrives in a city that she has never been before. She wants to find something to eat as well, but she couldn’t wait for others opinions as she is already on the street with many restaurants in front of her. Those restaurants all look pretty good. So she just opens our app, find the build-in function, the dice, and lets the system to help her decide. It only takes her a few seconds to get the answer.

I think many people have encountered similar situations, like deciding the restaurant in a food plaza, or deciding the flavor of an ice cream. It’s not easy to make those choices, but it is not that important to hear from others suggestions. At that time, the dice would be the best choice.


Storyboard from Chen Liu and Ye Feng

Storyboard from Shuo Ma (Our app can make you save money!)

Storyboard from Esan Hassanzadeh and Yuqian Cheng

There are much more interesting stories that our team members came up with. In the procedure of presenting everyone’s personas and storyboards, we also discussed our app functionality in detail. The highlight of our “Decision Maker” is that we could make decisions after hearing others voices. The user will get point for answering questions, and they need to pay some points to ask a question. Such a point system will encourage users to answer questions and provide constructive suggestions.

Another good thing is that the user will get notified if the person who asked the questions take your choice. It is really helpful for people to feel that their voices are important and heard by others.

We have discussed about classifying different groups as well. People need to enter some information during registration, like gender and age. Would it be reasonable if the user could choose to only allow a specific group of people to vote when creating a question? That could be a good feature, but it could make the result to be biased. Even though the functionality of our app has mostly been decided, our team members are still brainstorming, trying to find something that could make our app more unique and practical for users.

COGS 187A Summer 2017

Cognitive Web Design

)
Lumos COGS187A

Written by

COGS 187A Summer 2017

Cognitive Web Design

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade