Team 18: Serena, Carina, Madison, Annabelle, Jared
Introduction
For our CS247B project, our team wanted to tackle maintaining relationships. We’ve found that many individuals in college were worried about how to keep up with friends in person while busy with school. Maintaining relationships has also been top of mind for many students who plan to graduate soon. Before attempting to design for this complex space, however, we needed to know what already existed for us in the field to learn from.
Analysis
In our comparative analysis, we analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of 10 smartphone apps. Each has a social aspect, some primarily emphasizing social media presence and others specializing in messaging and notification systems. We’ll give a short description of all 10 apps before mapping each app on a matrix to show each competitor in relation to each other in terms of intervention and activation.
The first 3 apps are centered around notification systems and automated ways to maintain relationships.
Garden – Link
Garden helps the user maintain relationships with friends, family, and business networks by periodically prompting the user to reach out to them. Garden is simple and direct in that it only focuses on sending reach-out prompts based on the inputted time intervals. This prevents information overload from too many other features. However, Garden does not allow the user to input what type of interaction; they only allow the user to record the time of the last interaction, which lacks nuance in documenting the user’s relationship with others. Unique value proposition: Keep in touch with your family, friends, and business connections by getting reminded by Garden.
Pplkpr – Link
Pplkpr (a tech-influenced art project) analyzes biometric data taken from a smartwatch and acts as a tool to manage relationships for you, such as sending texts or scheduling events automatically. “Emotional bandwidth” and “time” are expected to be finite resources, and Pplkpr introduces itself as a way to alleviate the stress of maintaining relationships in a social circle. The project is meant to be a conversation piece about surveillance, authenticity, and automating emotions. Unique value proposition: Let your emotions optimize your social life for you.
Cloze – Link
Cloze is a customer relationship management software that prompts the user to maintain customer relationships, automated tracking of digital interactions, automated response, data visualization for project statistics. Clove allows data imports from apps that the user is already using (email, calendar, social media), which makes the onboarding process for users very convenient. However, Clove sends many notifications and prompts to the users (all context prompts), and may result in information overload or decreased sensitivity. Unique value proposition: A centralized platform for all your relationships that prompts you to maintain connection.
The next 4 apps attempt to simplify the process of reaching out to and communicating with friends.
Wendr – Link
Wendr is an app that simplifies how you make nightly plans by letting users set plans for the night and also see what their friends have set from “Going Out”, “Staying In”, or “Open to Suggestions”. Wendr saves the frustration of asking multiple contacts if they’re free, only to hear from them hours later to learn that some are staying in, catching up on work, or recovering from the night before. The app does not seem to have gained traction, and there are a negligible number of users using it which would be difficult for new users to learn about the app and use it with their friends. Unique value proposition: Wendr makes it easy to discover what your friends are doing tonight and access nighttime events and activities.
Locket – Link
Locket is a mobile widget that shows images taken by your friends in the app. The app succeeds in non-invasive nudging, instead of notifying you that you should post, you notice when the picture on your locket changes, and that acts as a subtle nudge to post. However, the onboarding process is quite difficult which is shown through reviews supporting it’s 3.4-star rating in the app store. Also, Locket currently only allows you to post photos that you take in the app. Either allowing for posting from photos your camera roll or allowing you to save Locket images could be an improvement to this flow. Unique value proposition: A quick, visual way to connect with your closest friends.
LokLok – Link
LokLok is a lock screen modifier that connects the user’s lock screen to the ones they choose to share it with. This allows for small, meaningful communication without the need to even unlock your phone. However, since the lock screen is the most public-facing part of someone’s phone, they might not like having their friends or family be able to draw or write whatever they’d like onto it. We could improve on this model by trying to find a happy medium between convenience and privacy for the user. Unique Value Proposition: A shared lock-screen that keeps you and the ones closest to you connected through doodles, messages, and photos.
BeReal – Link
BeReal is a social media app that prompts users daily to take a photo of themselves during a randomly selected two-minute period during the day, which is then circulated to other users; users can see each other’s posts for that day only. The app emphasizes a focus on authenticity (see: “be real”), features a stripped-down take on a picture feed, and offers routine connection. On the other hand, some users take the option to post outside of the window, subverting the theme of authenticity. Unique value proposition: The only social media where you can, and should, “be real.”
The last 3 apps are social media apps and/or focused on messaging systems.
Marco Polo – Link
Marco Polo is a video chatting app that allows you to send private short video messages to friends and family as an alternative to long meeting calls and messaging across apps that collect your data. Marco Polo takes away the need to coordinate meeting times over different time zones by letting their users respond to video messages on their own time. It’s like Snapchat, but messages are not automatically deleted! There are more privacy risks to Marco Polo than advertised. Users have complained of strangers joining their private group chats. Users have also complained of the app spamming their contacts with invites right when they allow the app access. Unique value proposition: Marco Polo is the video chat app that brings you closer to the people who matter most without asking you to compromise on trust.
Instagram – Link
Instagram is a mobile and web social media application centered around photo and video sharing. Its strengths stem primarily from appealing visual aesthetics and accessible user engagement features. However, it is currently limited by its ability to manage and prevent the spread of misinformation. As such, Instagram should prioritize enhancing information verification and accountability processes. Unique value proposition: Share on Instagram to feel connected and present in your friends’ lives!
Snapchat – Link
Snapchat is a mobile app primarily focused on the present where users send disappearing photos and videos to their friends. The temporary nature of the shared media paired with the novelty of creative filters allows Snapchat to stand out from its competitors. However, the platform has been criticized for having a non-intuitive onboarding process, especially for some older demographics. To remedy this, Snapchat should take steps to make the onboarding process more user-friendly or improve the intuitive nature of in-app functions. Unique value proposition: Take a snap and send it to your friends and express yourself with speed and ease!
Insights and Future Opportunity
As stated before, we mapped all competitors in relation to each other on the basis of intervention (disruption) and activation (effort). The apps we looked at were scattered across the matrix, with some blank spaces in the Low-Intervention / High-Activation square and the High-Intervention / Low-Activation square.
We first thought about creating something in the bottom right square (High Activation, Low Intervention) but realized there were probably many reasons for fewer apps being created there: an app that took a lot of effort but didn’t add that much to a user’s life probably wasn’t that valuable.
Next, we thought about creating something in the upper left square (High Intervention, Low Activation): this seemed to be a good middle space between creating a full-blown social media app and an app that would be fairly passive in strengthening relationships. We’ll aim to explore this space going forward!
Signing off,
Team 18
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