Users

Our potential users are as mentioned above:

• Browsers who would like to know what is going around them, searchers for activities, types, location, and dates
• Casual Users who may join sports activities occasionally and need motivation to exercise by knowing more sportive people and adding them as friends, rating. And trying different types of sports.
• Social users who would love to expand their social circle and make more friends to hang with chatting and sharing things.
• Sports lovers who really would love to practice and exercise bet cannot find someone to share the love of a certain sport.
• Sophisticated sporty users who love creating and organizing sports activities choosing the date, time and location, and inviting people (public or private), scoring and rating.
• sports professionals who would love to expand their social circle around what they do, rating, adding friends, and may like to practice sport out of their work.

User Value

From the lecture Social enterprise, The value of our social application for our users is

• Digitalise organizing casual sports events for a wider user interaction
• Exploring sports friends online that motivate you to exercise.
• Getting Others in your digital ecosystem ( adding friends-chatting-sharing)
• Enhance availability of sports activities that are generated by the user themselves(personalization and more engagement).

Designing The survey:

Our aim

Our project aims to design a location-based sportive online social network. So it aims is to explore people’s use of sports activities related social networks, their opinions, requirements, and preferences about what our “SoSporty” network application might produce. Our location-based social network unions people online and offline to share the love of a certain sports activity.

The design

We designed our survey using Google Forms because we are familiar with this tool, it is free, results go directly into a shareable spreadsheet, it supports a wide range of question types, mobile friendly and can get notifications on email.

After an introduction to the survey and going through the participants’ consent procedure, Our Survey “ Southampton’s residents’ use of a sportive social network” has concentrated on three main parts which we would like our potential users to answer. They are:

• Sport-related Questions
• Online social networks related Questions
• SoSporty mobile network application

To see in detail our Survey, and how it really looks like for the participant (with specific questions used) please view our screen recording of our GoogleForm below:

Preparing Our Survey

In order to see what elements of social networking application are most important and will satisfy our users, we decided to use a qualitative method to investigate. For our application to be successful it has to fulfill our potential users. That’s why We decided to take their opinion on our design and the main functions that we would like to implement in the application and have their feedback to support the construction of this social network application.

We have to choose between two qualitative methods: interviews and surveys. To decide that we weigh the advantages and disadvantages of both:

Surveys:

*advantages:

Low cost, Scalability Speed results, User Anonymity and easy to analyse and easy to get ethical approval.

*Disadvantages

Sometimes dishonest, the difference in understanding, responses maybe unconscientious, skipped questions and have accessibility issues.

Interviews

*advantages:

Deep and expand questions, express emotions and feelings and suitable for complex and detailed topics.

*disadvantages:

biased answers, confirmation bias (the interviewer), time-consuming, not anonymous and smaller number of participants and its hard to get ethical approval due to personal information.

By weighing up between the two methods we decided to go for the survey since the time element is important for us, it is easier to conduct, it is free cost. Our topic is simple, the questions are simple too, we need more participants, and our sample are adults so most probably they would be able to fill the questionnaire.

A survey is more likely to elicit participation as participants can fill the survey at a convenient time to them, and we will not be asking any personal information.

We chose to design our survey on Google Forms, since they are simple and analyses responses automatically. Can help spreading the survey through email and other social media.

References:

Aldridge, A. and Levine, K. (2001) Surveying the Social World: Principles and Practice in

Survey Research. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Bell, J., Waters, S (1987). Doing your research project. McGraw Hill Education: New York.

Blaxter, L., Hughes, C. and Tight, M. (2010). How to research. 4th ed. Maidenhead, England: Open University Press, pp.223-225.

1. Development purpose

This APP is developed to provide a comprehensive platform for people who enjoy sports and social activities, so that people can more easily participate in activities to meet the needs of sports.

2. Project overview

• Development background, goals and market prospect:

For Southampton area, there are no relevant Apps in the market at present, which has both sports information and social performance. The development of the App wants to achieve a goal for combining sports and social activities, so that more people living in the Southampton region participate in sports activities and have a convenient and intuitive platform to view the information. The App targeted market is currently in a limited range, and it will continue to develop into a larger market, not only for one area, but also to the whole UK or the world market.

• Target group:

All of people who likes sports and social activities in Southampton.

• Operating system:

Android, IOS

• Technologies:

3. Functional requirements

The functions of the App are:

• Log in and create account

There are function for users to create personal accounts and log in, users can have personal pages to check activities what they join in, they also use personal account to join activities.

• Map

A Southampton map will be showed, all of activities can be showed in the map, users can see the location of each activity through the map. Activity display is more intuitive.

• Personal information list

This function provide a place to show the personal information details, like name, nickname of users, settings to change information with different demands, the privacies of App and users, a button can log out.

• Search

The App has search function, users can use search box to find different sports activities, according to search time and key words to find which activities are match their needs.

• Screen

In screen function, there are some tags to make users choose, like types of sports, different time, providing convenient choices to help users to make decisions.

• Chatting room

This function provides a place to make users do communication with each other. When a user join in a activity, he (she) can goes into the chatting room to talk with other group members, to know each other and get more information about sports activity.

• Message reminding

This function shows the message of chatting rooms and some news about App, if user’s participation time is near, users will be reminded to participate in activities.

• Activity display

Activity display shows the details of each activity, the name of sports, the location and the time of each activity, also shows the participators who join this activity. Users can join in activity in this place.

• Activity creation

This function for user who wants to upload a new activity, user can set up own activity, the basic functions of choosing sports, taping time, writing description about activity will be included.