Where’s the platform to schedule a quick coffee hangout or an instant movie night with your friend?
From the perspectives of a business industry, the niche of social media is one the most promising ones. Though we cannot ignore the fact that this segment is highly dominated by some top players, but the continual update in technology has opened up plenty of opportunities for the realization of new ideas.
One of the very first social media platform dates back to 1970 when University of Illinois had developed PLATO system for online forums, bulletin boards, instant messaging, and several other features. Fast forward to 2020, we have thousands of social media apps to choose from. When creating a social media platform, it is necessary to understand that these social networks can be provided from scratch or as an add-on to some existing platforms.
There are a few steps which are commonly considered when designing a social media platform:
1) Connect with existing social media apps — Users have already entered their personal information a zillion times on other apps. It is better to cut down the way to new experience by “Connect with” or “Login Using” one of the existing apps.
2) Allows self-expression — Should give the user freedom of customizing contact names, profile pictures, create groups and direct chat messages.
3) Creating a network — Any social media makes sense only if the user can interact with friends and family members easily.
Identifying an unmet need
An unmet need leaves a clear opportunity for designers to create a solution to address the problem. As an active user of currently trending social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, there are a couple of needs which aren’t fulfilled by the current apps. One of those is that it’s difficult to schedule casual events with friends. There are a few options for planning larger events using platforms like Google Calendar and Facebook Events, but there is no platform to schedule quick coffee-date or a basketball match with friends.
Though these plans are social, people often feel uncomfortable using calendars for casual social events. There aren’t a lot of options available to efficiently plan casual events. Individually texting a bunch of people to plan out something is quite old fashioned now a days.
Hence, keeping this requirement in mind, thought of designing an app which lets the user make a plan, informs the user who is going, creates a group chat for every plan user makes and allows the user to share live moments from the experiences.
Making plans can become another source of stress in our already complicated lives. Hence this application allows to better help group of friends get together for casual dates without having to worrying about organizing and arranging things.
Here is a wireframe design explaining the layout of this application:
- Make Plans — Instantly send invites to friends from contacts without any hassle
2. Never miss out on any upcoming invitations
3. Get details about chats created specifically for a particular hangout and share live moments from the fun hangout to let your friends know what you are upto!
So the overall layout of the app looks like the image below :
Finding an unmet need is the key step in developing an app that has the potential to acquire users at a rapid pace.
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