The Path to Pellets

I’m incredibly proud and excited to announce the newest application developed at RiceApps for the Rice student community: pellets. Pellets is a platform that enables students to participate in hyperlocal discussions ranging as large as campus-wide to as small as a 10-person seminar class, all under the comfort of anonymity. While pellets might seem like a YikYak clone at first glance, I hope that the following series of articles will change that. In this article I’ll illustrate how I first analyzed campus problems and YikYak’s flaws before deciding to develop pellets, while the next will dive deeper into the novel features included in the application as a result of the issues discussed below.

The BeakSpeak Postmortem

The first step in my problem-solving efforts was a postmortem on pellets’ predecessor: BeakSpeak. BeakSpeak was an iOS application built nearly 3 years ago by a team at RiceApps, with a primary goal of copying the functionality of YikYak in a way that was only accessible to the Rice community. In practice, this led to a poor YikYak clone which used the Rice login system. The product was ultimately unsuccessful due to this approach, with the core reasons broken down in order of perceived importance:

1. The product focused too much on copying YikYak’s functions without really investigating the underlying problems which the YikYak platform sought to address. This led to “nice to have” features, like reactions, which marginally improved the user experience but wasn’t validated through user research nor did it actively address problems faced by the consumers. Instead, during development the team should have considered the underlying problems YikYak solved, and tailored solutions which would distinctly benefit the Rice community.
2. The product was developed as a mobile application using React Native, which led to several issues with adoption and growth. While it was reasonable for the team to optimize for iOS given its majority market share in the Rice community, they faced numerous obstacles in launching the application on the iOS App Store which forced the team to ultimately “side launch” the product via TestFlight. This created a confusing barrier to entry for many potential users in the Rice community, resulting in significantly slowed growth.
3. The user interface lacked input from an in-house designer, which detracted from its overall appeal. In any consumer-focused product, the design is an important element which can determine the application’s success or failure; furthermore, with the clear connection between BeakSpeak and YikYak, it was doubly important to maintain YikYak’s fluid user experience and beautiful interface. Thus, falling short of this standard also contributed to low user retention and adoption.

After reflecting on BeakSpeak’s failures, the logical next question was whether a successor is necessary — in other words, “is there a market need?”

The Efficient Market (Need) Hypothesis

If I was to ask you that question, your first thought is probably “no”. I had the same immediate response as I considered the saturation of community-driven social media applications (Facebook, Twitter), privacy-focused messaging applications (Snapchat, Signal), and pseudo-anonymous applications (Reddit) — just to name a few. So what changed my mind? I challenged my assumptions, and did the first thing many in academia do: I turned to the literature.

I found this journal paper by a team at Georgia Tech which described the “why” behind YikYak’s success. It presented anecdotes of various college students’ usage patterns, reasons for joining or leaving, and the overall benefits that students sought from using the platform. After reading through the paper, the problems that YikYak solved specifically on college campuses became quite apparent. The main emphasis of the paper was that YikYak delivered a platform which addressed students’ needs for anonymity, hyperlocality, and ephemerality; but more importantly, it described how YikYak was able to succeed on the synergies and interplay between these three needs, summarized as “situated anonymity”. This is where the market need exists: none of today’s platforms offers a compelling synergy between these three features.

With this background, it became clear that the need is still there in the general scope of college campuses, as none of the issues highlighted by the paper had disappeared since it was published. Thus, the next step was to determine whether the need was still present at Rice. To validate this, I looked back on one of the first surveys we conducted at Rice this year when we became RiceApps chairs. Part of the survey asked several questions about potentially novel BeakSpeak features (before we realized that BeakSpeak was technically unsalvageable), as well as other inquiries seeking out general thoughts from the student body. To my surprise, many of the responses clamored for the return of YikYak. I’ve included one such exemplary response below:

PLEASE DO YIKYAK. I’ve always been so sad that we missed that boat because it sounds hilarious. Pleaseeee do it, it’d be so funny, everyone would genuinely use it.
— one overly-enthusiastic survey respondent clamoring for YikYak’s return

Of course, a good problem-solver never takes a solution at face value — but this was a promising start. Beyond our internal surveys, I searched for other forms of validation. I settled upon using focus groups made up of peers at Rice to analyze the two closest alternatives that students have right now: “Rice Twitter” and the up-and-coming mobile application, Librex.

Alternatives Analysis

The first alternative, “Rice Twitter” is essentially a makeshift hyperlocal community of Rice students that discuss topics and issues related to campus life, their day-to-day circumstances, or other Rice-related events. Through this platform, students are able to connect with one another within the shared context of Rice and how our lives are shaped by the campus or events happening inside it. “Rice Twitter” does especially well in the areas of hyperlocality and ephemerality — as soon as a situation arises within the Rice environment, the users of “Rice Twitter” chime in with their thoughts, creating an interesting and real-time discussion on the topic.

However, lack of anonymity on Twitter appears to be a significant barrier to participating in discussions for many students, according to several members of the focus group. There are two primary reasons for this: the first is a fear of judgement by others, which appeared to be especially intimidating given the small nature of Rice; the other is more practical, with some feeling nervous to put anything on their Twitter as employers might check their profile during recruitment. The consequence of these concerns is that “Rice Twitter” has fewer participants and perspectives shared than those diverse views exist at Rice. Thus, while many students may read “Rice Twitter” and follow the users that do feel comfortable posting, the barriers to entry preclude input from a sizable portion of the student body.

The other alternative, Librex, is a YikYak-clone which has the opposite problem of “Rice Twitter” — what it has in anonymity, it lacks in hyperlocality and ephemerality. While users can only see posts from other Rice students in Librex, the limited tag options and post format create an environment where most posts drift towards general Q&A. Unlike on “Rice Twitter”, where following peers within your residential college and other organizations at Rice enables you to tailor a customized hyperlocal experience, the limited filtering options available on Librex makes it impossible to find these smaller communities. Meanwhile, the post format was cited by several students in the focus group as a hurdle to frequent use, since they felt that the three-step process to post was “too involved”. In all, most members of the focus group said they had installed the application earlier this semester after hearing about it from friends, but nearly half deleted it by winter break after their disappointing experiences. With Librex, I found the strongest signal yet of a desire amongst Rice students for a platform that combines anonymity, ephemerality, and hyperlocality, yet no platform that could truly deliver it.

The Decision

Between the literature, Facebook surveys, and alternatives research, it was clear that the underlying principles that set YikYak up for success were still desired by Rice students but lacked a product which delivered all three. With this validation, I decided to dive into the action and address the hole in the market with Cloris, our Head of Design. In the next post available here, you can read about our design decisions, the features included in the end product, and the plan for pellets moving forward.