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Close

Disclaimer

This is a study of 7 young, undergraduate, computer scientists, passionate by the idea of develop something that people would use and buy. All that's written here is an offspring of what we learned about our market. Re-searches, scientific papers, surveys, some assumptions and a lot of user feedback. Think of this as a diary about the first steps of our entrepreneurial journey.

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Disclaimer

The Book

The Book

Why is this being written in a book anyway? Wouldn't a blog better?Startup normally use blogs, but we wanted to try some-thing different. A book forces us not only to just share the whole process, but also to be more critical about it, we will need to be more precise, secure and organized about what is written.

Being computer science students we very often tend to begin writing code as soon as possible so we can actually see the re-sult of it. We’ve been taught to build software for N.A.S.A. And this made things a little difficult a couple of times, be-cause as we learned through failure, this isn’t the best way to run a Startup. So we read, discussed, and agreed that we will never again launch a rocket without knowing exactly why are we welding each part and who is benefiting and paying for that. From now on, we will commit to built products the right way: as Eric Ries, the writer of “Lean Startup”, says: built something customers want pay for, as quickly as possible.

This book is about our journey learning the right way to build software and more importantly: how to build a the right prod-uct, aimed at the right people in the right time. As you'll see through the book this doesn't mean that our product will be the next big thing, or that we will have a million thousand us-ers. It just means that this time we won't screw up as much as we did before, and if we do screw up, we won't waste our (and others) time, and money building something  people won't use.

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Context

Context

According to a Stanford University/City College of New York study released in August, the Internet was the third most popular place to meet a new love interest in 2009. About 22% of all the 3,000-odd heterosexual couples in the longitudinal How Couples Meet and Stay Together Survey who met in 2009, did so through the web. Only a slightly higher number met in bars, and the highest proportion met through friends.

That’s where Facebook takes place. While it doesn’t have an official dating app, it certainly have a number of ways to meet people. Men often prefer to to do their date-fishing on Facebook, because women are more open to approaches from guys who are known or close to somebody they know. Also, people are less likely to lie, or put up a horribly inaccurate pho-tograph on their Facebook profiles, because their friends will call them out. Facebook eliminates the "blind date" aspect in-herent in most designated online dating services because of the easiness to identify users connections (for example: iden-

tify if a certain person is a friend of your friend) and the al-ready available data about individuals throughout their com-ments, likes and shares.

One of our biggest concerns is that not everybody wants their dating activity publicized, so a more successful app would op-erate beneath the public wall of Facebook, and at the same time, we want our product go viral.

[TIME Healthland, 2011]

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Pitch

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Pitch

Tired to search for interesting people in the crowd?Ever wanted to be introduced to that gorgeous friend of one friend of yours?

Close can do that for you. Putting you in touch with your friends to look over their friends list and find people that can be interesting to you.

Close - A clever way to make new friends

Hunting Primary Data

CHAPTER 1

Hunting Primary Data

After the concept of the product became clear in our minds we started a journey that lead us to understand that all of our as-sumptions could not be considered true unless we had then tested before. We needed something to prove that we were in the right direction. At first we thought that this would be im-possible considering we had no product at all to show. But we then noticed that if we could do it, it would save a lot of time (and in a real world situation, money) in planning and devel-opment.

Our first attempt was to unleash a simple survey with a con-trolled and mixed group of possible customers. Teenagers, adults and any kind of people that we thought would like to meet new people online (we began assuming that our target market was mass market). We asked a couple of questions, try-ing to build a map of how people meet other people after the Internet, and how they do now with Facebook.

Survey description:

We ran a series of five questions on Facebook. Each turn a dis-tinct question was asked to a specific group. After five turns, all groups had answered all the five questions.This was done this way because of Facebook's limitation to only one question per poll. And since we wanted to be as close as we could to our possible users we decided this was the best way to survey then.

The data were inconclusive to show any big difference be-tween the controlled groups. We think that it's needed much more data to accomplish any valid conclusion. The poll also pointed to us that people use social networks to maintain a re-lationship that have started in any kind of social event. We ex-pected data showed that people could start a relationship through the Internet especially on social networks. It's already proved that it happens quite well in the general Internet, be-cause of successful dating sites like Match.com.

By the end we had more questions than when we began the survey. Things like: why isn't there already a successful exam-ple of dating service on Facebook? And even, why relation-ships that starts through the Internet often involves people that have no friends in common, wouldn't it be more natural to happen between socially closer people? Had the friend Cu-pid passed unnoticed through digital age?

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Ask a giant for second data

CHAPTER 2

Ask a giant for second data

In this chapter we are going to discuss some of the key decisions we made in order to develop CLOSE. To do this we surfed the web looking for articles, mainly papers that would help us making decisions about how our product should be, and how it should work. We had a mindset to find scientific based information, to support most of our decisions. Some would consider this a overhead of work, in our defense we have experienced just the opposite. Since we had scientists work in our side we could skip some of the "trying and miss-ing" fases, and make a hit faster, because those people have al-ready researched, and could quickly tell us what works, what don't and what's better. Another very important point is that our team is all formed by technology people, none of us have any social sciences background, so since our product is com-pletely based on how people interact among each other, it makes a lot of sense to consult people that have studied, re-searched and actually know "how people interact among each other".

From now on we will quote articles we found and com-ment how the piece of information is important to us.

To begin, lets see why do we use social networks:

"The bottom line is that this goes back to the fact that, like all primates, we are an intensely social species, and having our friends, cohorts, and acquaintances close is important to our general success. In these senses “keeping the wheels oiled” is critical, hence why we like gossip, and hence why biographies and fiction so wildly outsell anything else in the books mar-ket."

Then we discovered that in the end it is just like any other thing in our capitalist society, it is all about capital, but this time not "money capital", it's the social capital:

"In 1916, L.J. Hanifan (in context of rural schools) discussed the concept of Social Capital, defining it as, “..that in life which tends to make these tangible substances count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sym-pathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and fami-lies who make up a social unit"

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Now knowing a little bit more about human relation-ships, we are able to understand why social networks are grow-ing so fast on the web. The answer is very simple: as we saw in the articles, we are social animals, we already had our social networks, the web just made it faster to grow, easier to inter-act and harder to manage since now we have so many connec-tions, and information about this connections run so fast that it's becoming hard to keep the pace.

We learned that internet social networks are extensions of real life social networks, lets see how big this extension be-came:

"According to Facebook’s own statistics (as at April 2009), they have more than 200 million active users, more than 100 million of which use the site daily, and together upload more than 850 million photos a month, over a billion pieces of con-tent a month, and interact through over 25 million active groups, and 2.5 million events."

With this, we can now start to see some important facts to support CLOSE. Who are the people that we have in our so-cial networks:

"It turns out, though, very clearly, that our social networks are no larger in virtual worlds than in reality. The people you have on your network are the people you would typically keep into contact with in reality, face to face."

This last quote intrigued us. We all had "friends" on Face-book that we new from somewhere, but that we actually had not talked to. But then we realized that this people are not ac-tually in our network, they are just another "hyperlink" in our pages, just like anything on the internet. As the article men-tioned, we realized that people that we kept in touch in Face-book are exactly the people that we would "keep into contact with in reality, face to face".

We then started to think how this information could help us on helping others to make friends on the internet. We saw this:

"It seems, to me, that relationships are face to face things. There is no point in having a virtual relationship if you are never going to see those individuals again as it crowds your “mental boxes”"

and this:

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"You are surrounded by an endless series of expanded layers of social networks. Your inner core is 5, which extends to 50-150, 500 and eventually out to around 1500. As you go out through the networks, the number of people included in-creases, the average quality of these relationships declines."

This quote was very important, it led us to think about witch people we should present to our users so they could make actual friends. The answer to that was clear: friends of friends are the ones that we have more chances of meeting face to face. We noticed that after a on-line interaction it is very easy for us to meet friends of friends, since they com-monly will attend events that the "friend in common" will go an so do the user. Also, it's not weird to set a encounter with the 3 involved people (the user, the friend, and the friend of the friend).

Lets now learn more about human interactions in social networks. How differently men and woman behave:

"If you go away from home (to university, for example) your relationships with friends do decay in time. Phones have helped to slow that decay considerably, but there is a big differ-ence in how males and females service these relationships. With males, its about “doing stuff” and making arrangements

rather than chatting on the phone (e.g. I’ll be back in Newcas-tle, shall we go for a beer, etc). With females, it’s the conversa-tion which slows the rate of decay."

"There is something about the female psyche which is in-tensely social, and the most trivial conversations become part of the process of bonding. This perhaps is what causes the dif-ference in message in sms, facebook, etc."

This helped us on considering how to make the design and forms of interactions more neutral, so both, men and women could have a good CLOSE experience.

Another thing we thought would help our product be a hit was the fact that Facebook profiles could be used as a trust-worthy form of learning about people and the veracity of what they are saying. This can be used to give users a safer experi-ence and also help then choosing who are they going to begin a relationship with. Here is something to support this:

"respondents were asked to rate how accurately their profiles portrayed them and whether that portrayal was positive, as judged on a 1 to 5 Likert scale, with 5 indicating high agree-ment. Respondents reported high confidence that their Face-book portrayals described them accurately (mean=4.16)"

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Putting that on paper

CHAPTER 3

Putting that on paper

We gather all we have learned so far and brainstormed about. What users wanted, what we think they really needed. But the brainstorming wasn't helping enough, after a couple hours we have a trunk full of possibilities and tons of post it's.

So we decided to take a different approach, by creating a flux from the first thing the user sees to the last one.

With a tablet in hand we began. We admit, at first it was superficial and a little bit shinny, but when the process had finished we’ve got something to develop.

The history begins with Jake, a 24 year old man who wants to meet some girls, dance, chat and possibly start a rela-tionship. Jake already tried the conventional method: go to clubs, mainstream one’s, alternative one’s; shows; bars. And this was his approach through the past 5 years.

Some day he decided to try internet services to do that. Two more years passed, experiencing awkward dates and now Jake is 26, tired of dates, guessing his never going to be in a relationship.

Last friday at work, he found his friend Mike in a web-site that seemed like thousands one’s that he passed through over the years.

And Jake says: - don’t do that to yourself Mike. You de-serve more than that. What this girl have in common to you, a hobby? This isn’t enough.

It’s more than that Mike says. She is friend’s of Monica, my neighbor. I used this website to ask my friends what friend’s of them would form a great couple with me. At first I didn’t hope that it was going to work either, but my friends knew me, they knew what I like and what I don’t. So who bet-ter than them to help me, to meet new people. And just like that I found Brigitte. We have been in a couple dates and it’s been awesome. You should try. What’s the name of the web-site, Jake asks. CLOSE, Mike said.

Jake wasn’t really sure about it, but if it had worked to Mike it should worth a shot. When Jake get’s home he entered CLOSE and ask privately his Facebook friends(Mike and Ana) what girl they know that should match with him.

He didn’t knew at first, but Ana has a beautiful and cool friend named Molly that is the one for him.

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While he waits for Ana and Mike to respond CLOSE show some recommendations to him.

He watch them for a while, hopping that his friends doesn’t take much longer.

Ana, sees a message on her Facebook:

He is a nice guy, I will help him. And she enters CLOSE.

She runs to her Facebook friends list, and pick 4 girls to Jake.

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Then she set some stars to show how funny, sexy and trusty is each one of them, puts a personal comment, choose some nice photos of them from their Facebook album and indi-cate them to Jake.

Jake receive the list Ana sends and start to look one by one.

One, named Molly actually get his attention. But an-other one seems nice to. So what to do? He put them together, in a challenge, to see witch one of them is the write one for him.

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And quickly he decides: It’s Molly! It’s she the one I have to meet.

Then he pokes Molly, message her, and add her as a friend. By this far they had started a great friendship.

And four months later they became valentines. That’s the happy story of Jake & Molly, but only because they are CLOSE to Ana.

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This Jake & Molly story is our flux, it’s how our users intend to use our product and that’s what we gonna keep in mind when we built it.This flux became our base to build the CLOSE prototype. So, to the Wireframes!

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Building a sketch to interact

CHAPTER 4

Building a sketch to interact

Wireframes are an important design tool used in Web development. It is a visualization tool for presenting proposed functions, structure and content of a Web page or Website. A wireframe separates the graphic elements of a Web site from the functional elements in such a way that Web teams can eas-ily explain how users will interact with the Web site. In this chapter we will explain the behavior of CLOSE application.

This is the diagram of the application, it has the func-tion of demonstrating how the system will flow. When the user enter for the first time in the application

without having been referred by someone else, he will be di-rected to this page. It is his first access, so he do not have rec-ommendations yet. Because of this, we will refer to him a set of friends and acquaintances, for him to  choose from and re-quest suggestions of suitable friends for the user interact to.

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After selecting people, the application, based on a rec-ommendation system, indicates to the user, people that have common interests based on their profile information.    

If the user returns to the application and the people whom he

chose, did not yet made the recommendation, the system will again show people with common interests.If the user has enabled the option "Challenge!", this option will be active at the bottom of the application.

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If the user come back to the application and the people whom he chose have already made recommendations, he will be di-rected to this page, where people listed will be grouped to-gether, showing the friends that were recommended.

This page is sent to selected people. Once notification is re-ceived, they can select one of the two options. At the bottom we show how the dispute goes.

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This is the profile generated by the system, it groups simple information such as name, age and city. Events that the user will attend appear on this page as well. It's also possible to see their facebook profile, add the person as a friend, send a inbox message and make a Challenge. The other picture shows a user requesting friendship.

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This is the area where the option Challenge is prepared, the user selects a set of people who will battle against the person selected. After selecting the person, a notification is sent to the user contact. They will be directed to page D.

The user who requested a Challenge can see the battle status in this page.

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Something to see

CHAPTER 5

Something to see

About the graphic elements

It's clear that todays websites are developed in a way they look simple, clean and pleasant to the eyes, people don't want to have those old desktop applications with a thousand buttons and configuration options, the want simple things that what they're meant to the quickest way possible. With this in mind we took a minimalist approach to our design. Our goal was to make it easy for the users to interact with others and spread the word to more people in order to make this viral.

Colors

Since our target audience are young people and the service we provide is anything but formal, we choose to use a very colorful logo. 

In the application itself we used an opaque tone of or-ange for the main background. Orange represents en-thusiasm, fascination, happiness, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation, combining the energy of the red and the happiness of yellow. It’s also highly accepted among young people. We choose opaque be-cause non-opaque orange is too aggressive for the vi-sion, making it uncomfortable.

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How the wireframes helped us on this stageAs is noticeable, designs shown in this chapter are very similar to the wireframes shown in the last one. Our technic was to test usability with wireframes and after having good responses to it, built our designs. Wire-frames are easier to create and change, giving us more flexibility and agility to test different configurations, and making small changes to it. 

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Credits

©CIn - UFPE, User-Machine Interface 2012

Bruna CruzFilipe XimenesFelipe FariasHugo Bessa

Josiane FerreiraRafael AguiarRonald Dener

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Credits