Qualitative market research is an important part of designing a new online social networking site. Before starting work on the design of EventHive, Yani interviewed several students who study at the University of Southampton. Yani conducted an unstructured group interview and aimed to explore potential users’ general attitudes towards event-based social networking sites.
These students were asked what kind of event-based websites they usually use and what these services’ best features were. Following this, the students were introduced to EventHive and asked to comment upon the concept.
Positive Feedback and Recommendations
When discussing EventHive, some participants stated that the ability to see what events their friends are attending is good; it will encourage them to attend those events that their friends attend. Social and communicative features are important and the group recommend that EventHive enrich this functionality.
Other recommendations include:
- Users should be able to rank events and add comments, allowing users to recommend events to others.
- A useful function would be to have recommended restaurants around the events’ locations, as well as information about how to get there (transports and route recommendation). This will help users enjoy the event experience more.
- Specify and categorise the type of the event: gig, museum, movies that need to buy a ticket, or other types.
- Provide video tutorials explaining how to use the site.
Negative Feedback
This part gave us practical and realistic user insights into event-based social network usage.
- Some participants like to directly talk to their friends about events around the city. In particular, they like to chat, communicate and share experiences through Facebook. EventHive should promote its communicative elements more.
- Because EventHive is a new website, some think event quality cannot be proven, which might lower perceived reliability and trust
- Some worry about events featured on services not being up-to-date, or might not include a wide enough range of events. They would prefer to use a more familiar and relevant website that better reflects their interests.
- Some think that a site dedicated to events is unnecessary; Facebook is enough.
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