Community Bazaar
A system for home-based business in Gated communities
Why we came up with this concept?
With the changing work culture people have undergone huge lifestyle changes. There were times when people used to live in independent houses, then came apartments and quarters and now the trend of gated communities and townships is all over the place. These models are vast enough and comprises of several families. In addition to basic amenities, these townships also provide educational institutions, shopping malls, hospitals etc. Most of the residents living here belong to middle income group or higher income group.
In the current situation, generally people are occupied with their respective “9–5” work hours. Most of the gated communities and integrated townships have a significant percentage of people who stay at home after their fellow family members go out for work. These include housewives and senior citizens some of whom desire to participate in the financial growth of the family. Considering this group as our target we work in making a platform for setting up home based business.
Since these societies are quite huge, people don’t even have an idea if their fellow residents are into some business. Through our system design, we are making an attempt to encourage people to start their own home based business within the community premise and let other residents know about it so as to get benefited in return.
People living in big gated societies already have a benefit of quite a vast number of residents living along with them. Though, they all live in the same premise, hardly do they talk or know each other. This thought brought us an idea that could help people to use their spare time in something they enjoy to do and can create a business out of it.
The problem statement
Designing a system that promotes home-based business inside the premises of gated communities and integrated townships.
Workflow and advancement
After finalizing on our topic we worked on mind mapping all the possible scenarios we listed out our target audience and location. Since we wanted to know what sort of home based people generally do and how do they advertise it we came up with a set of questions. This questionnaire was used for interviewing purpose, though majority of them were telephonic interviews. Through these interviews we got an insight about what people actually think about the concept, their feedback and their expectations.
We also created a Google form and conducted surveys to get people’s take on home based business. We got around 48 responses which are shown below.
After analyzing the reaction from interviews and answers from the survey we collected all the insights. Few suggestions from responses were really helpful and we look forward to include them in our system.
We realized that there will be constant questions about how our home based business feature will be different with respect to other applications like Whatsapp, Facebook which is generally used by people to promote business. Therefore, we did competitor analysis and marked and studied the features other applications are providing and analyzed what other steps we need to make a difference.
What next?
With this direction of work, we plan to analyze how the whole household business system will work. Mapping out the target audience and placing them in the system to create a whole journey out of it would help us in build the experience in a better way. User Journey Map will help us in plotting all the sellers and buyers within the community and how the business between them is running.
Next, we plan to create a detailed Service Blueprint to chalk out the relationship between all the service components.
As a tentative plan, we could also look into an advertising video that can help in explaining the concept in a better way thereby promoting it.
Contributors
Radhika Belkhede
Meghana R Upadhyaya
