Opportunity:
Orbit is a social reminder app that helps people with fast-paced and busy schedules remember to maintain and build the relationships in their lives.
Though technology has made the world much smaller, it has also brought a great many distractions and faster pace. People often find themselves procrastinating interactions with others; they put a call to an old friend, a text response to their college group chat, and a note to an ill relative on the backburner. There is always something else to be done today, so the most important parts—the people we love—can sometimes slip through the cracks. This problem presents an opportunity to bring people closer together and in more frequent contact.
According to interviews with our target users, Orbit would be very useful in their lives. Its other benefits exceed the MVP but are still important to mention such as remembering important dates or events in people’s lives or remembering what one spoke about in previous conversations. Overall, Orbit makes people more intentional in their social relationships. Rather than waiting for people to reach out to them, using those messages as cues to reconnect, Orbit helps people reach out first. The reminders are tailored to each relationship the user has, and they always have the option to snooze or decline a reminder. No more Calendar alerts, to-do items, or mental lists taking up space and energy. Orbit remembers for the user.
Customer Case Study:
Noah is a young professional who has trouble keeping up with friends and family. He has a busy job that requires him to travel often, and any time he has at home is spent with his wife and their dog. He spends his free time running, working out, and playing video games. He frequently keeps in touch with friends who have common interests like video games or fantasy football—these interests make it easy to interact online. However, the friends he isn’t physically close to and doesn’t share those interests with receive a text from him only on special occasions. With the proper product solution, Noah could receive actionable steps to reach out to those friends he doesn’t speak with. For instance, his college roommate Sean, who lives across the country, hasn’t texted him in a while. At first, Orbit might remind him to send a simple text like “how have you been.” Already, this text could initiate a conversation and reconnection. Next time, Orbit might suggest Noah schedule a phone call with Sean to catch up. They might discuss when they’ll be in the same area and can hang out. Afterward, when responding to Orbit’s poll to see how he feels after the call, Noah could realize how good it feels to be the one to reach out and want to do it with others as well. Simple, actionable goals can help bring people like Sean back into Noah’s life.
Uncertainty:
Our top three areas of uncertainty are whether or not people will find our visual map to be a positive (rather than anxiety-inducing) motivator, complete the challenges we suggest, and feel closer with their friends and loved ones after finishing a challenge.
To reduce uncertainty regarding the visual map, we will learn more about what visual indicators motivate people. We’ve already explored this through interviews, but we can get a better understanding of what people actually do by observing their behavior. For instance, we can observe people responding to or writing texts to see what makes them want to reach out in the real world. Also, to see if people complete the challenges we suggest, we need to investigate what activities people do when they want to maintain a connection. Our interviewees have already mentioned texting and calling, but we need to know if organizing more involved activities such as bike rides and concerts is a feasible challenge for our users. To learn more about this, we can talk to people about how often they would like to do certain activities over others. That way, we will know how often to suggest more extravagant activities over the mundane ones. Finally, to assess whether people feel closer to their friends after completing a challenge, we may need to commit to more observational studies over time. It was difficult to assess the emotional impact of a simple text since it was so instant, but perhaps we could see how a relationship develops over time as a result of multiple challenges.
From our research related to habit-tracking apps, we know a lot about user motivation. For instance, notifications can be enough motivation for some users to drink a glass of water or do 5 minutes of exercise. But for others, a given task must be tied to an abstract reward that is greater than checking a box. This is why our app isn’t limited to push notifications: we include a visual map as well as reflection prompts so that users get visual documentation of the progress they make. Our research also revealed that users are less likely to stick to a goal if an app is paying attention for them. The user has to be genuinely engaged in the process of building a habit in order for it to stick. We hope that as we save each user’s progress, users become more aware of how these challenges are improving their relationships, and continue to complete challenges as a result. Eventually, users may become so engaged in the process that they remember to maintain their relationships on their own.
We would know our app is working if people continue to use it even after they experience a reddening or distancing of the relationships with which they haven’t made as much progress. That would mean that the visual indicators of relationship progress are motivating people rather than making them want to quit the app. Also, we know our app is working if people actually engage with the customization features. If people are changing the default reminder frequencies for certain relationships, for example, that means the app is helping users think critically about how they are going to maintain their connections. On the other hand, we would know our app isn’t working if people aren’t adding new connections to their map. This could indicate that the onboarding process for new relationships is too tedious for users to navigate. We would also know things aren’t going as expected if users continuously decline, snooze, or don’t respond to challenge notifications. That would mean that we need to make the challenges more manageable and perhaps less frequent.
Ultimately we rejected ideas around full habit tracking (too complicated and broad), while also rejecting ideas around micro transactions. We also decided against having any social aspects of the app, and instead chose to focus entirely on the individual user experience. While it would have been interesting to have a social component to the app, we felt it was contrary to our goal of improving and maintaining human connections off the platform.
Alternatives do not actually solve the needs of our target market. Some, like Cloze, are business oriented and extremely data intensive, and others like Garden lack any visual intrigue. Our need finding interviews continually show both a need and a void. The cost of delay would be losing a potentially wide open market.
We plan to utilize react native, and should production continue into versions 2+ we would have a backend of Mongo DB. We also plan to utilize animation libraries to create fluid motions for the visualizations. Combining the various data visualizations and implementation aspects, we estimate an MVP would take around 1-3 months to develop.
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