Trust Building App
Problem Statement:
World is evolving, online shopping is a trend. New products with different variations are launching excessively. For online exploration, trust is also the main factor. Now the trouble with the existing online system is the bootstrapping problem, if a new company emerges in the market, the existing system does not have capability to generate a rating for it; same goes for new products of existing companies. This issue causes an uncertain situation for the customer to, whether go for the existing product with less specs or the new product of a new company with much higher specs in the same price. When a new company is launched, it has to compete with the products of existing companies. When the existing company launches a new product, the rating of the product can be driven from the historical data of that company. Now the challenge is to give ratings to the products of new companies.
People who facing problems with existing systems:
- Customers are confused and have a hard time in the selection of the product because there are so many choices. In online exploration customers cannot determine the quality of the product only through textual and graphical description. The customer deserves to know more.
- New companies and manufacturers, they neither have ratings and reviews nor the trust of the customers.
Our target audience (Demographics):
- All types of social economic statuses (lower, upper, and middle class) and for both genders.
- Age (16–60) group.
- Employment status can be student, employed and unemployed as well.
- As our system is online so it’s accessible everywhere.
Stakeholders:
Following are the stakeholders of our project:
· Customers
· Companies, Manufacturers
· Software Engineers
· Business Analyst’s
· Researchers
· Social Media Managers
Location:
It’s an online idea of providing the services so we will be using our prototype and social media:
Which type of media platform we will use?
We will use Facebook and Instagram for our project publicity and grab attention of our target audience.
Purpose of using social media?
Through social media we will promote our project. We will share these pages with public so that huge number of people will able to know about our system. Basic purpose of this project is to provide information about different products so that customers will be able to choose the best one from all products. We will clarify these points through social media:
· What we are doing?
· What benefits you will gain from our system?
· Update of our project
· Customers queries
· How to contact us?
· Customers feedback
How we will do this?
We will create pages on both social media platforms and we (Aneela & Saim) will be sharing information about our project on these pages and will also visit the pages of our competitors due to this we will be able to find differences which will increase quality or strategy of our pages.
Solution:
There is a need for an application which critically rates the products so that customers can easily choose the product according to their requirements. Our challenge is to build such a system which recommends the customers the desired product with inadequate resources and consequently building customer’s trust on our system, and also analyse the respective products to determine its price, reliability, comfort and quality to compare it with existing products of different companies according to the standards that are set and give critical ratings and grading. On the basis of scale, customers can easily trust the product. The rating scale is from 1 to 5, 1 means worst and 5 means excellent. Formula is built by assigning different weight-age at grain level of product mobile specs, quality of services, and warranty. This will not only help customers but will also help new companies with detailed review of products at grain level.
Timeline:
· It will take a week (06/04/2020 to 12/04/2020) for exploring the new mobile companies and analysing the existing one in market. This will be beneficial for the detail analysis of the products such as their features and prices and will provide a good compare and contrast between the new introduced companies and the existing one.
· In second week (13/04/2020 to 19/04/2020) we will work on prototype and will try to complete 50 percent of this. In parallel to this we will start the collection of data according to our requirement.
· In third week (20/04/2020 to 26/04/2020) we will take steps towards social media activities from this platform we will initiate social media campaign. With this, population of data in prototype is managed. At the end of this week we will be able to complete almost 90 percent of our prototype.
· In fourth week (27/04/2020 to 03/05/2020) we will go to manage multiple things in parallel such as social media campaign and system generated ratings. We will have a complete prototype of the given solution that will help us to check the success of our system and finally we are going to write a blog and complete documentation.
Actionable items:
· Our main objective is to design a prototype that will critically analyse the product with specific readings ranging from 1 to 5 (lowest to highest). This will help the user to choose the product wisely and this improve one’s decision making power.
· We will examine the positive and negative aspects of the products belonging to new emerging companies and will give rating after detail analysis.
· At the end of this fellowship we will be able to display our prototype along with our results. Our goal is to spread our work at least among 50 individuals to get the feedback.
Task Division:
The distributions of the tasks of the project are as follow:
· Ahmed and Abdullah are handling the technical aspects of this project like prototype.
· Aneela and Saim are handling the social media and research of the product, companies and customers.
Reflections:
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Following are the reflections of our project which are divided into several parts such as:
· Challenges
· Benefits
· Group learning
· Principles and Values
· Future learning
Challenges:
1- Division of headings/tasks:
The first challenge we all faced was the division of the headings of the blog, because we decided and assigned the headings as per the expertise and when we started and comparing it with the given instructions, the assigned headings were overlapping among each other.
Solution:
To overcome this we did a discussion that we need to take account of the instructions first and according to that which headings falls under our assigned task we need to do that which is not in your domain give that to the other in whom it falls.
2- Communication gap:
The second challenge was the communication gap because of the busyness of some members (Abdullah & Aneela) things get bit late and we all were not able to communicate at a single time to clear things out like to clear some confusion, asking about some term like principal and values moreover to ask about the feedback as well.
Solution:
The solution to this problem is that we discussed in the group and decided one specific time in which we all will be present and then we all will discuss our queries.
3- Research:
The third and the most difficult challenge was the research for our project, as we (Saim & Aneela) had to do a lot of browsing on the internet in search for our required data so it was getting very difficult for us to do this task in time as it was really a time taking process.
Solution:
So, what we did to overcome this challenge was by spending time on every website we instead filter the most used or official websites of the companies such as (Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, whatmobile and GSMarena etc.)
4- Timeline:
The toughest challenge was for all of us (Ahmed, Abdullah, Aneela and Saim) were to manage the timeline of our project because of the COVID-19 situation we had to change our project at the very last moments and then after discussing with our mentors we had to change it and even to manage it in the given time frame in order to that we had to do a lot of work which was really a big challenge for us.
Solution:
To overcome this challenge we had a zoom meeting among us and discussed briefly how to manage it so we came up with the solution that we will divide the tasks (Ahmed & Abdullah will handle the technical aspects of this project while Aneela and Saim will be doing the research and handling of the social media) among all of us and will work on daily basis in order to be efficient, productive and to achieve our goal well in time.
5- Less no. of members:
After the COVID-19 situation, we had to change the project, so in this project we needed more man power to work because the scope of this project is big and we are just 4 members. So, at this time and the circumstances we can’t ask other fellows to be in our group cause everything is already been sorted.
Solution:
In order to overcome this challenge what we did is to limit our project’s scope like restrict it to one technology as per the given timeline and team members and also we need to do more hard work to achieve the target.
Benefits:
1- Builds Trust:
Working in a team builds a trust among the team members like when we divided the tasks among each other we had a trust or faith in our members that they will perform and will complete their task (Ahmed will work on the problem statement, people facing issues and the solution, Abdullah will work on timeline and actionable items, Aneela will work on the social media and Saim will work on the stakeholders and the reflection section) on time.
2- Learning:
When working in a team, there are always bright chances that you will learn new things like I (Saim & Aneela) learned about the prototype thing and the how the main function of our project will work, on the other hand I helped them understand that this reflection is not about the project but more about ourselves what we are our learning’s from the project.
3- Feedback:
When working in a team, you take the responsibility of the given task, work on it, submit it and ask for feedback is it up-to the mark or not. The other members are there to help you out to improve. Like when Ahmed sent his original document I (Saim) gave him the feedback that you can improve it by specifying the audience which we are working for like specifying there socio economic status and employment status.
4- Support/Encouragement:
With the given time and conditions, working in a team was really a blessing because when we suddenly have to change the project and have to work on it from the very beginning this was really frustrating but the supportive role of team specifically (Ahmed and Abdullah like keep yourself together we can do it) made us keep our nerves calm and work together as a team to achieve our target.
5- Strengths:
A team works well together because team members rely on each other to bring individual talents to the table. By observing process behind those skills, you can learn how to combine your gifts and become a stronger team. Like everyone had different approach to this project which certainly was new for everyone but we eventually selected that which was easy to understand and in which we all can agree.
Learning of all team members:
1- Aneela: I learned that working in a team is really effective as it’s enhances my abilities in my assigned task moreover; it also helped me to know my mistakes through positive feedback from the other members.
2- Ahmed: Through this project I was able to explore new mobiles companies, learned how to work in a team and also learned how to handle pressure in tough situations.
3- Abdullah: The main takeaway from this project is that how can we make our goals smart, also I was clear about our project flow by dividing it into further small activities.
4- Saim: The main learning for me in this blog is that I learned by distributing and managing tasks among the team members that it’s really a blessing working in a team with in such short time. Moreover, learned how to manage everyone to follow the deadline.
Group Learning:
There are many learning as we can speak of but we actually learned the meaning of a team. A team is something which is there for you in every up and down. Learned what actual impact a positive feedback can creates. How a support of team can help you bear the pressure when working in a tough situation also how can you be specific about your goals through writing down your activities and last but not the least how can be manage ourselves to meet our deadline by sharing the responsibilities equally. Also we thought of a problem which our audience is facing so we came up with a solution to implement it to resolve the problem which is related to the principle of AMAL which is implication. We had to research for the data from different websites which made us explore the principle of KHUDI which is self-learning. In a short span of time, we have to do a lot work like research, prototype and to manage social media which was quite frustrating but learned about the mantra of KAM KAM KAM which is hard work so we gathered ourselves, rolled our sleeves took it as challenge and managed it by organising each day in a way that we can maintain our mega project as well as the other works. E.g. Ahmed helped Aneela with her document through positive feedback because it helps other to understand well. Abdullah helped Ahmed with problem statement and the solution through some feedback likewise I (Saim) helped Ahmed with his document like mention the socio economical and employment status as well to be more specific. We all helped each other by applying the AMAL principle of EK or EK GIYARA which is teamwork.
Values:
· Honesty: This really helped us in our first blog of mega project because everyone was honest about its responsibilities, and was giving the exact time in which they will send their parts of the blog.
· Responsibilities: Everyone been responsible towards their given task, nobody said that we will not do this; every one took the responsibility of their assigned task and provided them on time.
· Growth: Each and every member in the team showed a great spirit of growth by working timely on their task and it helped us to meet our deadline well before time.
· Humility: We didn’t have any conflict or any argument regarding anything which made it easy for us to do our work effectively and on time.
· Acceptance: Nobody judged anyone on their calibre or any other thing related to their work, we all accepted it with all our heart and provided the positive feedback where were needed and the one receiving it didn’t be defensive. So, it also helps us in saving our time.
Future Learning:
Base structure of the application is developed and our prototype which supports the bootstrapping problem is ready. In the light of future aspects the grain attributes can be divided at hardware level to achieve more accurate results. In our project we are restricted to mobile phones but our model can be used in any business environment like Fashion industry, Shoes industry, Smart TV, Automobiles, Movies, and many more. You name it and we are there. Technology wise, Web plugin of this system, Android /IOS Application will be handled.
