GPS Tracking is one of the most usable today’s features in mobile phones used by millions of people. According to our project, users will be able to see where the stores are located and how they can get there containing meaningful directions by car or walking. Tracking services will be achieved via Google Maps because they offer several and helpful information about the location of places. Specifically, every offer is associated with its store so user will be able to get directions using the GPS tracking operation thus finding directions on how to visit the shop from a specified location. Additionally, when the user watches a particular offer or discount then all nearby shops will be appeared on the screen allowing user to visit these ones as well especially when he/she is at that region.
GPS tracking
March 22nd, 2011Finalised Features and Ideas
March 22nd, 2011- GPS Tracking and finding shops with offers nearby
- Filter search based on location, products, types of discounts etc
- Classification of products and stores (e.g. electronics, clothes)
- Post of new offers and discounts
- Categorization of users to shop owners and simple users
- Categorization of users according to their number of posts (Novice, Expert)
- Reward system (discount offer or vouchers according to the number of contribution and interaction)
- User registration and ability to login through Facebook and Twitter social networks
- Users are able to rate offers
- Comments on posts
- Creation of groups and establishing friendships (visible offers to a specified group)
- Shop rating and subscription
- Recommendation System
Idea for New Feature
March 7th, 2011I was searching for some information about my camera, when I came across to http://www.testfreaks.co.uk/. It is similar to ProductWiki that Raj reviewed below, but where people are also rating  items that they own or just they have tested. You can find ratings for almost every electronic item you want to buy, from cameras to microwaves. They include numerous categories and each category has its own specifications for rating. All items have a global “Freak Score” which is the overall score of the item out of 10. You can also find some other useful information about the items, as were to buy it and its price.
We can include a similar but more simple feature to Shopster. Users will be able to rate items they own. The user would be able to write his experiences with the item and  put a mark to some categories. These categories could be some global ones as value for money, build quality, performance or something similar, ease of use and an overall score. We can then add a product search to the application and the results will show shops with the selected items and of course its overall score.
ProductWiki
February 26th, 2011Even though ProductWiki does not provide a platform for online shopping, it provides product information which helps users to make shopping decisions.
In my opinion, Shopster application should make use of the services provided by sites like ProductWiki, which will provide shopping related data.
ProductWiki is a wiki for information related to products. I.e. the site contains information about different products which are grouped into categories like computers, fashion, music & recordings etc. The content is added & modified by users like a conventional wiki.
The site aims to provide unbiased, accurate and community-based resource for product information.
ProductWiki is open content, which means nobody owns the content – anyone can use the information on the site in any way they want to, commercial or otherwise, as long as they give credit to ProductWiki as the source.
The project has just started and information for many products may be missing in the list, but it is beginning to gather momentum. The basic information about the products is available in the product page. If any user needs further information, or has issues making purchase decisions, they can start a discussion or comment on a product page and ask for opinions from other users.
Currently the site is focused on English content and products released in North America including some occasional Europe and Japan only product. However, the creators of the site hope to spread globally as the project grows.
source: http://www.productwiki.com/
Survey (9-11/02/2011)
February 25th, 2011We created an online survey on freeonlinesurveys.com and had it running for 3 days. The purpose was to ask other people what they thought of our ideas for a mobile app and have them to choose between 3 possible applications that we wereWe shared the link on our facebook accounts as well as on MSN and 84 people responded to it (which is quite a large number of participants). The link for the survey is no longer available since we had to pay and become premium members in the website in order to be able to look at the results forever. However, we have saved the results into a word file which I have uploaded. The link is given after the survey questions.
The questions included in the survey were the following:
1) Gender (Male/Female)
2) Do you own a smartphone (e.g. iphone) which can access the internet? (Yes/No)
3) Do you use your smartphone to search and download applications? (Yes/No)
4)Â We have come up with some ideas for mobile applications and we want to present them to you and ask for your feedback.
One idea is for an application similar to facebook places where users would be able to not only state where they are but also provide useful information about that place. Some examples include coffee shops, restaurants, pubs and clubs and the information they could provide are things like:
– “Is the place (coffee shop, club, etc) empty, few peoplke, half-full, almost full, full?”,
– “What groups of people are present? Young, middle-age, old people”,
– “What kind of music does it currently play?”
These are just some examples of information that could be provided interactively by users of the application. We believe that by learning for example if a place is empty or full, people can decide whether they want to go there or try another place. This can save them time, for example. Users could also get to meet one another. They could also be able to comment on these information or rate it as trustworthy or not, they could post their own information about the same place and the system could possibly weigh the two feedback based on each user’s trustworthiness. Owners of such places may also find it useful to promote their venues if they wanted.Another idea is an application where shop owners as well as users would be able to post information about sales, offers and discounts provided at a specific shop. We believe that this information is only available when people visit the shops or if they specifically search each shop’s website. By using this application, users could get informed on current sales and offers without the need to go to the shop themselves. Shop owners could also use this to promote and advertise their shops. By allowing users to post such information, other people can also read comments about how worthy or accurate an advertisement/offer is and perhaps find out about the variety of items offered on sale, their availability and their price ranges.
A third idea is to design a mobile application that would receive live data from buses (and/or trains) just like the data you can see at a bus stop (e.g. bus1 arriving in 7 minutes). Again, this information is only available once a person goes to a bus stop. But if this infromation was available as a mobile app, people would not waste time waiting at the bus stops, especially if it’s cold or if it’s late at night, etc. The application could also enable a user to read the route timetables or propose possible bus routes for going to a destination (this kind of applications are already available, of course, but not with the feature of live information, we believe=).
Please tell us which of the 3 ideas you find more interesting (maybe more than 1) and think that you could actually be using it regularly. Use the textbox in the next question to tell us possible additional useful features that these applications could have or maybe some alterations.
Venue (coffee shops, pubs, clubs) information Shop sales, discounts and offers Live travel information 5) Tell us your thoughts on our ideas explained above
6) We would be more than happy to read your own ideas and suggestions for a mobile application (always related to social networking, i.e. an application that users could interact and feed information) that you think would be useful to people. It could be anything you ever thought would be handy to have on your smartphone.
The results can be seen in this word document (responses for participants’ thoughts on our ideas and any new ideas):
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ka2v07/COMP6051/SurveyResults.docx
The responses we received indicated that most participants prefered the Live Travel Information app, then the Venue information and the least prefered was the shop sales app. However, we then realised that the Live Travel Information app could not actually include a social network feature and we therefore couldn’t choose that one. We then discussed and chose to go with the Shop sales/discounts/offers app since it has the advantage that it could more easily be made profitable than the venue one and also it can be more useful than simply giving information about the number of people in a place and so on. So in other words, we chose usefulness and profitability instead of fun and gossip (?). We did consider what everyone told us, however, and we will try and implement some of the ideas that the participants shared with us in our shopster app.
We are also thinking of conducting another survey in the coming weeks for choosing what features to include in the app and whether people are willing to pay a small amount of money to become a premium member in order to be able to enjoy some more advanced features of the app (such as location searching).
Shopster Features
February 25th, 2011I am creating this post to keep a record of what features we can include in the app, as we discussed the earlier days. Comment on this post for your own ideas instead of creating new posts (I believe it’s better in order to have everything gathered here, in one place).
– GPS tracking and finding shops (with offers) nearby
– Ability to filter searches and display shops based on what city they are located, what products they sell, perhaps what types of discounts are offered, etc.
– Offer/discounts must have an expiry date (e.g. offer valid until ….)
– User registration of course is important. We said that it might be good to allow login from existing social networks (facebook, twitter) as well as new users registration.
– Thoughts on premium users(shopsters?). Maybe if a user pays to become a premium user, he/she can then have the ability to use GPS tracking or maybe filter results, while free users won’t have these abilities? What are your thoughts?
– Make a different category of users for validated shop owners.
– Reward system?
– User trust? User ratings on the discounts/offers they publish as well as general user rating/trust?
– Also include ratings for specific discounts/offers? Perhaps an offer is not very interesting or you are not actually saving much money…
Please comment in order to expand this list…