Community Bazaar

A system to promote home-based business in gated communities

Published in

Gigs, Service-systems & Platforms, and Design

8 min readFeb 8, 2019

The article puts forward the final research concept on service and system design for gated communities. The problem statement on home-based business which can help residents staying at home to earn and get encouraged, also, indirectly create a collaborative environment evolved with various feedback sessions.

Building a system promoting home-based business in gated communities forms the major focus area.

We see gated communities spreading rapidly throughout big cities. The lifestyle of people too continues to get busier day by day. How about a person staying at home in such gated communities surrounded by busy people off to work outside the home? How is the day in a life of such a person? What do that resident group in gated community urge to have? These questions made us come up with something that can help that group of people.

The gated communities are vast enough and comprise of several families. In addition to basic amenities, these townships may provide educational institutions, shopping malls, hospitals etc. Most of the residents living here belong to middle income group or higher income group. With the changing lifestyle everyone is busy in their respective “9–5” work hours, but there also exist some people who stay at home, especially housewives and elderly people. There is also a significant percentage of people who want to start something of their own at a small scale but due to some or other factors couldn’t do it.

This thought gave us an idea to help people publicize the home-based products thereby encouraging other residents also to start such a business. Giving them a good space or a platform to advertise the products can make a chief difference in the lifestyle.

Motivation to the concept

Since our childhood when there was no gated community culture at all, we have seen many of our neighbors pursuing their interests and creating a small home business out of it. These business were fairly small but somewhere gave them a sense of independence and a title of home entrepreneur.

Years have passed by and gated communities came into existence. These communities comprise of several families. Through observations and talks with fellow neighbors we realized that many people have that urge to start something of their own and many of them are doing it but not able to spread their business.

This motivated us to look into this matter and bring out small/big home entrepreneurs out in the field and help them with their business. Though technically all residents in a township share the same premise, they hardly interact with each other. Since these societies are quite huge, people don’t even have any idea if their fellow residents are into some business.

The process flow

Once our subject was finalized, we went on with gathering data for our research. First we started with surveys so as to get an idea of what all business idea do people have in general or what they actually do. Through these surveys we got an idea of our target group and then started interviewing our target audience.

During the interviews we realized that there are people who are also interested in non-commercial services as well like free yoga classes, library services etc. And people also got beyond the discussion and told us that such feature can also help in maintaining social collaboration. After going through all the points from interviews and surveys we were considerate towards noncommercial services as well and look into the social collaboration aspect through it. With limited time, it was important for us to focus on a specific problem statement. Therefore, we decided to go with only the commercial part and services inside community premises only.

Next step was to see what all applications and services do people use currently for promoting their business. We analyzed the working of WhatsApp for business, Facebook, Instagram and classified section of ADDA, use of physical noticeboard and brochures. Taking these as competitors, we analyzed their system, growth and uses and worked on how to make the whole experience much simpler.

To know more about how the process evolved visit Proposal, Process work.

Community Bazaar

Community Bazaar is an application which is basically meant for people who want to start their own business from home or for the ones who already are into such home based business and want to promote it inside their community. Promotion of all sort of commercial business can be done here and residents can shop offline. Interested sellers can post their advertisements and people from the community can see it. Seller can see how many people viewed the advertisement but viewers’ name will not be disclosed. There is a third parameter of contributors where he/she can propose a partnership with a seller if they share the same interest and it’s up to the seller to accept the proposition or not.

Limitations

The concept could include several other features to be deployed as an application.
People might prefer whatsapp over any other promoting platforms though the promotion through the app can happen in an organized way.
The conflict that can arise when partnership is not accepted and the competition that can be built in the society has to be analyzed further.
A close look at the traditional approach instead of interface building approach is not done in detail.

Outputs

Following are the outputs that were presented from our learning through the research.

A Journey Map

We created a journey map showing the journey of a seller, buyer and contributor while using our service. We have also captured various emotions the user goes through. We have covered various scenarios like a person deciding to put up his advertisement, to a buyer interested in buying, the views of contributors and other residents.

Service Blueprint

Service Blueprint includes detailed information of all the front-end and back-end activities going throughout the service. We speculated how our system should work and created a flowchart of all the steps involved. Keeping minimal complexities created a service blueprint out of it.

Concept Video

We created a video for Community Bazaar, it’s more like an advertising video showing all the features and services that Community Bazaar provides.

Takeaways

Throughout the whole research and the implementation there were lots of new things that we got to learn.

Came to know how a new system is planned in detail
Learnt how to map each and every small activities be it back-end or front-end
Not all users who are directly in contact with the system are key users, sometimes indirectly system can affect a group of people who may not necessarily be directly part of the system
We learnt that this particular type of service is mostly helpful in large communities and townships.
And also a major learning was that this feature can indirectly hep in creating social collaboration among residents and create an encouraging atmosphere.

After feedback sessions

After several feedback sessions and brainstorming we realized that it is important to look into the concept as a feature in the existing gated community applications or as a new platform. Several questions popped in mind as to think if the proposed concept can really form a platform. With the given service blueprint, the concept is seen as a separate application.

Examining existing gated community applications, we notice that there are several unused sections like discussion forums, noticeboard, and classifieds. One of the reason why these sections are unused could be the redundancy of information that could go into each of them. The title of the section seems repeating the same meaning and no one in the community would dig deep into the actual meaning of these titles and post relevant information. Thus, adding a feature in the existing application gains attention when the title is specific. As our concept is not so big to be considered to be an entire application on its own, integrating it with the existing apps with a relevant title seems like a better proposal. For this to happen, it is important to scratch off some of the already existing features in the app as mentioned above. The concept could have been an application on its own if it had included some more features. The question of why cannot an application be very simple still remains in our minds. As the sign up/sign in process is done by the gated community applications, adding the concept as a feature alone would remove the signing in process from the shown service blueprint.

We also looked into the concept in offline mode. What if there was no application at all? What if the traditional method worked better? Do we have to rely on mobile phones and apps always?

This brought us to an idea forming a campaign inside communities for their own benefits. We called it “Community Bazaar Campaign”. This was an entirely new perspective to look into but we gained many more insights.

Forming a campaign in the community would indeed increase interaction between residents and a sense of collaborative environment would be formed. Due to limited time, all we could come up with is a rough service blueprint of the same concept in offline mode.

Service Blueprints of Community Bazaar Campaign