Introduction

Problem

There is no single source of consolidated content from all around the web that people can access to fulfill their entertainment and browsing needs. People have to scroll through numerous platforms in order to find this content. This is inefficient since content is not target to the user most of the time. Moreover, there is no single repository or feed for people to save content to for later viewing and to share with others.

Motivation

We want to create the ultimate cyber drug to hook people into using our platform. We believe we can create a product that will only gather content that users will enjoy, thus providing a very gratifying experience.

Current state of the art

There are a lot of social media platforms, web applications and websites that deliver popular content to their users via news feed formats. Some of these are:

• Pinterest - more of a niche crafts and arts sharing platform, not very generalist
• Facebook - probably our biggest competitor, but is beginning to lose popularity
• 9GAG - great site for scrolling through memes, but has become inundated with ads
• Reddit - great for a variety of stories, but requires effort to switch between topics
• Google News - good for news, not great for entertainment

Representative Figure

Need Finding

Techniques and Methodology

For needfinding we will utilize a combination of techniques to gather as much information as possible. We will focus energy on contextual inquiry, interviews, surveys and observations. This is because we want to find a variety of information and data that will allow us to best know what our target users need. We also need to know what tasks are more important for them so that we know what we need to focus on when producing the app.

• Interview: This method will allow us to interact with potential users and to gather information about their needs. Our goals for the interviews are to get qualitative data and to be able to compare our responses with the results of the surveys. We want to make sure that we consider the information that is actually true.
• Surveys: We will use surveys to mainly gather quantitative information. Our goal is to know what is it that our potential users fail to receive from other similar products and services. We believe that surveys are a good way to gather this type of information, especially if we create a good, unbiased survey.
• Observations: We want to observe people using existing sites and apps to know what it is that they mostly use and/or do when interacting with one of these sites. The limitation of this methodology is that people might change behavior if they know we are making observations on their actions.

Procedure

The need finding techniques will focus on evaluating current similar sites and apps and to find what the potential users need from a new product. First, our surveys will gather quantitative data on these existing platforms. For example we will ask questions regarding:

• Time using the platform
• Favorite features
• Most used platform
• Opinions on possible features
• Personal Information
• What features they don’t like
• What should be changed

Interviews will be focused on gathering opinions from people on possible features, understand expectations and to analyze the successes of existing platforms. Our goal is to interview between 15-20 people to get a good variety of responses. To amass information we will also include similar questions to the ones on the survey. Some of these include:

• What existing social media / web applications do you use for entertainment?
• What type of entertainment content do you most enjoy?
• How do you spend your time using the existing platforms you use?
• What do you not enjoy about the existing platforms?
• What features would you like to see in a new entertainment platform that delivers personalized popular content?

Observations will be conducted by to analyze people usage of existing platforms. We will ask users to visit the two sites that they mostly use and to interact with them. We will ask of them to use the platforms as they normally would. For better results, we will also ask them to describe why they do what they do. This way we can collect information on how users encounter and interact with popular media in different ways.

We will recruit people with a combination of tools. Most of it will be done via social media. We will utilize the opportunity to gather information from peers taking the class but also will try to reach out to friends and family from different demographics. We mainly want to focus on the age range of 12 to 30 years old. For interviewing, we also want to recruit interviewees by asking people around UofR’s campus. We believe this will give us the opportunity to reach out to more than our social circles, thus getting more reliable and unbiased information.

Prototyping

Techniques and Methodology

To begin the development process, we have decided to go with the route of storyboarding. The goal is develop two or three scenarios that will make the potential user understand the purpose and benefit of using the product. MemeFeed is a purely recreational app for the user to interact with during their free time. Each scenario will appeal to the three main attractions of the product: easy interface, quality of content, and content versatility.

After receiving feedback from our storyboarding, we will jump right into wireframe prototyping. The reasoning behind this is to help the development team get started with a stronger backbone of the interface while at the same time giving the users a better understanding of the product through a more detailed design. We will be creating several different versions of our wireframe prototype. While this step may take slightly longer and be more rigid than the paper prototype, we have come to the conclusion that a wireframe will help streamline our work better than an abstract paper prototype. Additionally, since one of the main attractions to MemeFeed will be boasting its ease of use, we have decided that we are going to need more details with our design right off the bat rather than the big picture. The way we came to this conclusion is that our storyboarding phase is where we will be receiving the user feedback to help drive the design into a certain direction. From there, we will pick and edit the most prefered version from the user feedback.

Fidelity

For the first functional prototype of our product, we will strive to make the ease of use attraction the top priority. Throughout the course of prototype’s development from its first version to the finished product, improvements on both feed customization and back-end optimizations will be done gradually. However, we will be putting back-end optimization next on the list because we have agreed that the user experience will be more positive with a prototype that has pleasing aesthetic and strong responsiveness. Feed customization will be the last feature to fully implement.

Implementation

Technology Stack

Scheme:

List of features:

• Popular content scraped from the web delivered via a news feed from different types of mediums including text, video, and gifs
• Content learns and adapts to the user’s preferences over time
• Users can comment and like content
• Users can share their own content

Technical challenges:

• Finding or developing our own content relevancy algorithm that stands out from other content platforms in its simplicity and accessibility

Possible Solutions

• We will need to do more in depth research on the current relevancy algorithms existing today and see if they will meet our needs. The alternative would be to build a simple one from scratch, but that may not be necessary if quality ones already exist that are relatively straightforward to implement into our project.

We are using PHP for our backend in conjunction with standard HTML/CSS and JavaScript for the web frontend. We’ll also be using MySQL as our database. The project will have the form of a web application with both desktop and mobile views. We believe these to be the two most popular platforms (at least on this campus) and it is aligned with the skillsets of our team members.

User Study / Evaluation

The first step in the user study process is to have a solid storyboard prototype and to have people give their opinions on them. In terms of overall evaluation, we will be employing the needfinding techniques of surveying and interviewing to create a plan for the ultimate design language and structure of MeemFeed. We believe that our subjects will find that our core values and purpose, once identified by our techniques and completed, will lead to an outstanding user experience that delivers where other services have fallen. Additionally, we plan to run a few simple experiments with our evaluation participants in regards to the design and UI our prototypes. Of these experiments, our main focus will surround a long-term study regarding users’ feedback towards our application design and functionality, which will allow us to see if users are truly able to connect and interact with their feeds as we ultimately imagined. At this time, we plan to incorporate 10-20 participants per experiment, all of whom will likely be recruited via email, word of mouth, and social media advertisements. This range of users will maximize our data without having to call upon an unnecessarily large group of participants.

By using multiple instantiations of our experiments, we plan to employ the techniques of both within subjects experimenting and between subjects experimenting. We believe this will allow us to remove any type of bias from our data, including order bias, as well as allow us to accumulate a significant amount of data for all of our prototypes. As the main goal of these experiments is to test our application designs and interfaces, it is important that we keep the functionality and fidelity of our prototypes constant throughout our experiments. This is our baseline for control in our tests and will prevent a more or less functional design from receiving any type of bias and skewing our results. In addition to testing our prototype designs, we plan to set our final design against some of the current meme-delivery solutions in an additional round of experiments in order to test whether or not MemeFeed appears to succeed in its goal to become the most intuitive meme-delivery system out there. Some of the metrics we will be looking at include overall usability, design appearance, ease of access of meme content, and application response time.

Should MemeFeed not be a viable solution to the lack of an intelligent catch-all content aggregator, we will pivot depending on what kind of feedback we get from our surveying, interviewing, and prototyping. However, due to the already evident success of news feed aggregators, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this solution will be in demand. And should one of our features not work as intended, such as the relevant content feature, this won’t be too much of an issue since the base product of a news feed aggregator of popular content is already valuable in and of itself.

Timeline

10/16 - Start construction on backend (Lee), design database schema (Thomas)

10/16 - Write survey and begin conducting interviews (James, Lee, JP, Thomas)

10/19 - Build storyboard prototype and start getting feedback (Thomas, James, Lee, JP)

10/23 - Using feedback from storyboard prototype, construct wireframe prototype and start getting feedback (Lee, James, Thomas, JP)

10/27 - Start construction on iOS frontend (JP) and web frontend (Thomas, James)

11/8 - Aim to have feed complete by this date with aggregated content (Thomas, James, Lee, JP)

11/15 - Aim to have relevant content feature done by this date (Thomas)

11/19 - Begin user evaluations (Lee, JP)

11/24 - Create and edit video of our product and begin marketing it (James)

Bio

Thomas Pinella

A computer science major, Thomas comes from a background in web development, having used PHP, MySQL, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, NodeJS, React, and Angular in various internships and projects. He will be focusing on developing the web frontend for MemeFeed, utilizing his JavaScript and HTML/CSS abilities, and working on implementing a solution for finding relevant content.

Juan Pablo Castano

As a computer science major with internship experience, Juan Pablo has gathered important skills for web and mobile development. JP has worked with Swift, XCode and other important web tools, including HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Javascript, etc., which will help implement the front-end of the application. He will focus on UX/UI Design, working with various design tools.

Lee Stovall

Lee is double majoring in computer science and philosophy. His skillset mainly lies with his knowledge in backend programming and has had over a year’s experience of full-stack web development. Naturally, Lee’s primary role is to ensure quick content generation and a fast, responsive UI.

James Fazio

As yet another computer science major on the team, James originates from a background of web and software development and is fluent in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Java. He will primarily be focused on the front-end development of MemeFeed’s application, utilizing his experience with web development tools, as well as the marketing and advertisement of our meme-delivery service.