The project entails an online social web platform that provides solution to new entrepreneurs and aspiring businessmen to reach like-minded people to team up and start a business. As part of the community dilemma, the social community makes it easy for anyone looking to start a business or learn more by communicating to other experienced business professionals.
Many young entrepreneurs and students have brilliant business ideas that they wish to start. However, they lack the funds to start over or they are simply in need for a partnership with some other skill set. It has always been a challenge to find a platform dedicated to the needs of young entrepreneurs. Thus, this forms the rationale of the project; a dedicated business platform to allow people to form partnerships, discuss and form businesses.
The project aims to fill in the gap between Indeed and BusinessPartners, that are primarily focused on employment and crowdfunding respectively. Thus, it is different from Indeed as it is not focused on employment but rather the initial startup phase of a business which includes forming partnerships, sharing and discussing confidential ideas under strict confidentiality.
Our project also differs from BusinessPartners as we do not rely on crowdfunding and employment but rather sharing idea by mutual agreement between two or more parties. The project will harness the power of social and mobile computing to achieve its aims. An online website will be established that provides its users with a directory search of user profiles, discussion forums, messenger, partnership formation.
The approach to the concept is as follows:
Looking for Strategic Alliance: User would able to search for some individuals by skills area. If they are interested with some people found in the results, they could send them a message or leave a comment under their post.
Looking for Business Partner: User would able to make a post about their business and then wait for someone who like to join them to respond their post.
Looking for Investor: User would able to make a post about their business idea and then ask for investor to join them for further discussion by message.
Any discussion in messenger will be recorded under the Agreement of Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.
User would able to search for any business related to their skills area in this platform. If they are interested with the business, they could leave a comment or message the business owner to seek for partnership or work opportunity. Any discussion in messenger will be recorded under the Agreement of Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.
Investor would able to search for any business they interested by industry. If they are interested with the business idea, they could leave a comment or message the business owner/startup entrepreneur to seek for partnership. Any discussion in messenger will be recorded under the Agreement of Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.
- User need to create a residential account with real identities first. And user can create a business account with real certification which is linked to your personal account. Linking accounts allows our members to easily switch between their business and personal profiles.(Therefore, the user can access both accounts with one set of login details.)
- User’s personal and business accounts are treated completely separately and members will not see your personal details on your business page unless you choose to share this information.
- User can tag their profile in order to let other users to find by search function and the tag can be change many times by the owner.
- User must agree to the Agreement of Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions when signup a new account.
User could use the discussion forums to share their past experiences and learn from other business professionals publicly.
- Secure live-messaging. Most business starters are hesitant to share their idea publicly in fear of a cloned idea or be stolen. However, they need to share their idea first in order to form potential partnerships. Thus, the user would be able to send private message and engage with another party one-to-one with brief details.
- Before the conversation began, the conversation will be recorded for both parties and the original idea would be recorded beforehand which may be used in the court of law as evidence of the original idea. Any discussion in messenger will be recorded under the Agreement of Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.
Each profile has a messaging, audio/video and grouping capabilities to form a conference for discussion.
Our target users are mainly focus on:
- Startup Entrepreneur
- Business Owner
- Investor
- Individual seeking for job or partnership
https://github.com/deco3500-2017/teamhighfive/blob/master/Week%2010%20stand%20up/research.md
| Name | Student Number | Roles | Skills | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hui Ee Chua | 43863480 | [email protected] | Front-end, Back-end | HTML, CSS, Java, JavaScript, Python, Graphic Design |
| Mehroz Abbasi | 43515181 | [email protected] | Team Leader, Content Investigator, Mobile app developer | Apple Swift, iOS App Design, UX Design, Promotional material |
| Haoxiang Zheng | 44256810 | [email protected] | Front-end, Back-end | Java, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, UI Design |
| Kaho Ha | 43995783 | [email protected] | Designer, Content Investigator | Graphic design, HTML, CSS, UI Deisgn, Python, Java |
| Yaxin Cui | 44450672 | [email protected] | Designer, Front-end | HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, Graphic Interactive Design |
Front-end developer: Responsible for any front end development for the application
Content investigator: Finding new technologies that support the creation of the app. Create team discussion and brainstorming.
Mobile application developer: Responsible for developing the mobile application
Back-end developer: Responsible for managing the back end functionality for the application.
Designer: Responsible for designing all the UI content for application.
- All members are responsible for logistics. E.g.: meeting outside of workshop hours
- All members are expected to have their own laptop or other electronic devices for working together during meeting
Decisions will be made collectively as a group ensuring every team member’s ideas are taken into account. In case of discrepancies, the decision will be based on a voting system; in the case of a tied vote, we will consult with the tutors or the course coordinator to assist with any problematic decision.
The team will conduct an intervention with the poor performer in order to address their lack of contribution to the group. The remainder of the group will decide if their reason/excuse is legitimate or understandable. If the conflict is not resolved, the team will reassign the work and course staff will be notified of the incident.
The team will maintain the meeting in every weekly scheduled studio session and will flexibly arrange additional meetings as the work deems it necessary. Facebook is the main online channel for the team to communicate, adopted, explain the choice. The email will be used for sending information. Team members will be expected to check these communication channels frequently.
Files will be stored in google drive which will be sharing to all the group members. Content and purpose will be used as naming conventions for files.
To develop this B2B application, the development cycle includes numerous stages, such as research, requirement, design and construction. Our team should follow the plan of the project life-cycle in order to achieve the final success in rest of the semester. In following sessions, detailed project plan will be list.
Firstly, we need have a deep understanding of our chosen domain and idea. Our research should include the existing similar product in order to understand the differences between our idea and the product in the market and think about our strength. Our research is not only limited to the background information gathering, but will also develop paper or digital prototypes, which are able to help us to make improvement on our idea by going through tests.
In this stage, we need to gather the requirement from our target audience. A clearly requirements instruction will be very helpful for the development process. The requirements could be collected through the following methods.
We are able to search from Internet or other existing report to gather the existing user behavior study.
We will launch some quick surveys and interview questions. We can collect information directly from our target audience.
After some research about our competitors and feedback from our target audience, we decided to design some prototype for user testing. Our prototype is made by Adobe Experience Design and provided user an opportunity to do testing through it instead of low-fidelity paper prototype. We do improve our user interface and all the functions based on the result of user testing. Unfortunately we forgot to save the first prototype and its revolution progress because Adobe XD prototype link is the same one so it will overwrite the previous version.
Prototype link: https://xd.adobe.com/view/e699f7b7-7a29-40a6-b1e5-e881c11f6ed1/
| Prototype | Date |
|---|---|
| Week 8 Stand Up | 19/10/2017 |
| Week 10 Stand Up | 03/10/2017 |
| Week 12 Stand Up | 17/10/2017 |
| Final Prototype | 25/10/2017 |
After several times of user testing, we will implement a functional website for final interactive prototype. Coding will be used in this situation in order to produce more natural and working frontend interface. Our final interactive prototype website: https://deco3500-2017.github.io/teamhighfive/
- Idea confirmation
- User requirement gathering
- Product backlog
- Research from internet
- User survey and interview
- Create mockups
- Low-fidelity prototype designing
- Several times of user Testing
- Improvement for prototype due to feedback
- Plan for promotional materials
- Website development
- Final functional website
- Promotional materials
| Project Progress | Due Date |
|---|---|
| Project Plan (Oral pitch and project proposal) | 1 September 2017 |
| Prototype 1 (Interaction Walk-Through) | 12 September 2017 |
| Prototype 2 (User Testing Outcomes) | 3 October 2017 |
| Prototype 3 (Final Iteration) | 17 October 2017 |
| Final Prototype (Final Prototype Demonstration) | 25 October 2017 |
| Project (Design Prototype Final Presentation & Submission) | 27 October 2017 |
Since we are trying to develop application on both web side and mobile side, multiple type of languages could be used in this project. PHP could be chosen as the web side development language, because it is a wide used programming language for web. It has a great extendibility and compatibility. For the frontend development, bunch of technologies could be used such as HTML5, CSS, JS, jQuery and JSON.
For the mobile development, IOS could be our choice since some team member has previous experience on it.
For our design part, Adobe Ed could be our choice. It is a lightweight UI design tool, which just same as sketch. It has great compatibility with Adobe series software such as Ai, Ps.
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