Researcher Team — First In-Person Meeting
Date: 2012.09.20
Participants: Areum, Yuri, Byunghoon, Charles, Jiyoung
Written by: Areum
Edited by: ChanwooChanwoo
From the earlier in-person meeting, AreumAreum, who took the time to organize this document — a sincere "TYSM TYSM"!!! And for editing some parts without mentioning it first, my heartfelt ^^ haha apologies~ sorry, sorry^^ /
Oh, thank you for organizing this, ChanChan lol
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< Pre-work for the core idea: drafted with reference to Kelly's post >
Problem recognition
1. Main idea: "Let us deliver, through mobile, the experience of real time."
2. The experience of real time…
Who is the target, by what method, and what will we provide? "Who, How, What"
3. Before benchmarking, a core idea that aligns everyone's opinions and direction so the team can share understanding
— setting it and finding common ground
4. Prioritize the work for team-wide shared understanding first; implementation technology, GUI, interaction, and so on,
are counted as subsequent work .
Resetting the direction of the research team
1. Background on the product (the backdrop for why this product is felt to be needed)
1) The backdrop for target, services offered, and needs
2) Summary of problems
2. Keyword summary -> market trends through competitors (the problems they try to solve, their
solutions)
3. Defining and sharing the service we want to build -> building the design mental model
1) The direction we are currently heading in
2) The direction of competitors
3) Setting the main market by mapping each direction
4. Summarize what more we need and what to remove for entering the chosen market
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On "Who, How, What."
Charles: How preciously are we really treating the people precious to us?
The meaning of family up to now.
Let us turn physical time into time of communion.
Yuri: Limiting it to lovers only has its limits. (There is concern that the lovers track goes too much toward pure fun.)
Beyond a "we have grown distant, let's start tracking" app, we need to give it a more meaningful goal.
Not a D-Day but a D-Time, so that reaching 1,000 hours together becomes an anniversary.
(Humanism, as Jack Park mentioned..) Dad tries to hug his kid a bit more. When the target time is reached,
a reward is given — similarly we can improve the reality where evening time, morning time, and visits to grandparents are hard to make.
Time among family members for young people steeped in individualism.
Conclusion: Background // Give warmth, in real time, to the modern family where individualism runs rampant,
by injecting motivation. We need to make the time they do spend together valuable and truthful.
Byunghoon: No need to limit it to lovers. The goal is counting real time.
The precious people we fail to look after.
Offline / topping / chat count.
Fun network management.
The Mironi app (it analyzes the log data of music I listened to) — it is just for fun, but it is well used.
In the same vein, Real-Time could also be used well.
Areum:
Network management / pure time / reference the log-data-analysis-based curation feature.
Rather than people I meet often, we can use records of people I have not been meeting to encourage meeting up.
You register the people you want to stay in touch with, and over time the meeting-time data about them
will accumulate. Then the widget can show, "This 4th week of September, how about meeting (the ignored) Mr/Ms 000?"
and so on.
Conclusion: Background // Showing, with an emotional lens, the precious meeting time between me and you that even I do not fully know about,
to shift the value of encounters and to provide motivation — let that be our purpose.
Jiyoung: Things I am curious about
1. Why do we need to do this?
2. Once you step outside "lovers," does the scope not get too broad? Closed relationship / family is an open relationship.
They are so different in nature that it may not be possible to carry them together.
Smart devices are always attached to us as a medium, so I want to use that point.
I hope it will be something more intimate than Facebook.
Children do not have phones — how will that be measured…? Family is not so great a fit.
It is better to clearly split it into the lovers side / network side.
Byunghoon: For family, children might not have phones. For network management, the direction could be different again.
(Shared) So should we split the target into lovers, family, and network?
Byunghoon: This app is made for fun. Cases where I end up contacting the people I consider close to me less
are many. To spread it, I think "network" is better than "lovers."
What if lovers do not contact each other much? For example, give bonus points the farther apart they are.
For study, let us each benchmark separately for lovers / network / family.
Charles: Turn "being together," "calling," and "attempt count" into a relationship index, and show it as an infographic.
Reflecting on myself would also be meaningful.
Doing counseling through that seems like a good idea.
Within the process of the relationship, users can purchase items, or premium counseling services can be offered --> even offline
events can be provided. Analysis.
Or, use the accumulated time to give missions. Let us use the records more.
(Reference app - Phewtic? app. Japanese. phewtic )
Byunghoon: Not too many features. Diary, photo, call — these already exist. The tracking itself has meaning.
Offline, meeting, exchanging texts. + Let users record one "page" of time a day.
For calls, we can separate lovers and friends by long calls vs. short calls.
Let us reward it cumulatively.
Once it piles up, let users publish it to Facebook, etc.
Convert records into something emotional and show them that way.
Foursquare is good, but I do not use it because it is inconvenient. Automatic recording will be important.
Jiyoung: Let us exclude hardware-level constraints.
Drawing the path of the meeting itself could become meaningful when people gather later.
The more you visit a place, the darker the color. You could look at the map and pick a date spot.
Charles: Let us make our own events — claim areas like a "land-grab"..
Jiyoung: In the land-grab style, you could give a gift to the person who has covered the most area with you.
Put game elements in so people get immersed.
Let you meet a friend when they are nearby.
A sudden meeting with a friend.
Now let us talk about the problems.
Charles: Existing couple apps are, in fact, surveillance and control.
A sense of obligation.
There are too many couple applications. How do we differentiate and appeal?
Concern that the user's mental model may already be formed.
Other services have no revenue model.
Is it meaningful to benchmark apps like these?
Areum: That problem can be solved by widening the benchmarking scope. For example, not just looking at couple apps alone —
if we build features that consider the user's path, we could benchmark map apps — I think we need to widen the view like this.
Jiyoung: Rather, we should also analyze the problems of apps without a revenue model.
Charles: There may also be a D-Time issue for the moment before people start dating.
Jiyoung: Like Anipang, rank meeting time among my contacts (who have the app).
If it is time-only, people can be compared in ways that feel bad. A feature that deducts points when your partner does not reply quickly.
How about a service that provides a means to resolve ambiguous phrasing like "let's date"?
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To do
Each of us family / lovers / network with matching benchmarking. (Later, functional benchmarking will also be neededTo do.)
+ Including insight sections,
(Presentation style) "The market is like this, there are these problems, so to fix them we need this" — argue it that way.
For example, couple apps can be positioned on an "open vs. closed" axis.
(Through this process) So in the end, what we want to build is this.
