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ThoughtExchange

Summer 2019

Like twitter but with points

A market application place for your thoughts!

Made in collaboration with Mel Chen and Hyeonjung Ko.

Life cycle of a Post:

  1. Create post --> Users make anonymous posts about anything they want.
  2. Investment phase --> for the next 24 hours, other users have the opportunity to invest in the post
  3. Market phase --> post is open for voting: users can like or dislike ideas across the platform
  4. At the end of the market phase, investors and the initial poster get paid out

Additional features:

  • View their ranking (based on how many coins they have)
  • Vote on ideas
  • Manage and view their past posts and investments
Artboard 8

Process

The basic idea was that we wanted to create an app that would be fun to engage with and put a tangible value on a post's popularity.

Coding process

  1. Wireframed ideas
  2. Created basic xml views and fragments
  3. Developed a rest API using Flask and PostgreSQL hosted on Heroku
  4. User tested, User tested, User tested

User testing feedback

We got valuable feedback from people who user tested our application.

Suggestions we included:

  • Have rankings so that a user is motivated to earn coins
  • See user voting history
  • Countless other small UI changes to make things more clear like adding Onboarding, changing the naming from "feed" to "vote", etc
progression of creating a new post

Branding journey

We first started out with wireframes and our first hifi featured a bright yellow color. We thought that the yellow would be joy sparking and fun, but after some user testing, we decided that the yellow wasn't working. We then switched to a more sophisticated design with abstract lines in the background. We thought it gave ThoughtExchange a more professional, and fun, look.

Artboard 8

Android Studio and Flask

Android app made in Android studio that connected to a flask backend with postgreSQL database.

Supported Features:

  • Create posts
  • Vote on posts
  • Invest on other people's posts
  • View voting history
  • View previous posts and investments you made
  • View ranking

Final thoughts

I had a lot of fun making this and thinking about how to "gamify" social media. As we were conducting user tests, people kept asking for more and more features, but unfortunately, we were not able to satisfy all of the requests.

Future Features:

  • See most popular posts of the day, week, month
  • Comment on posts
  • Follow friends

made with ❤︎