Have you ever been walking through a city and notice an incident across the street and wonder what it was? Or what about be sitting in your apartment at night wondering the activities and events going on around you? The internet and rise of mobile applications has made us interconnected to our friends and family all across the world, however, we don’t really know what’s going on in the area around us. Shouldn’t this matter more? Wouldn’t you want to know to avoid walking down 6th between 40th-43rd on your way to work to avoid the protest that shut down those blocks? The web has opened our eyes to each other’s lives halfway across the world but has made us blind to the events occurring under our noses. The only source of information around your location in today’s times is the news, which is often too busy reporting on other events irrelevant to you. We noticed this was a problem we run into through our daily lives and at HotTub we wanted to solve this.

UNIDENTIFIABLE

HotTub is a new media concept that hasn’t really been charted before in the social scene. We decided to tear the walls down and gather content from those you know and those you don’t. HotTub is completely free of tying a post to a name or someone contained within your social circle. We wanted to create an app that does not rely on your friends or people you follow to populate your feed of content. Because of this new concept, we had to do research into what will help retain users and incentivize them to post. Looking into other social media apps we researched why and why not a user would create a post.

The question we have to ask ourselves is There is content all around us that a user can post, but the question is why do users post what they post? For instance, take something like Facebook’s Instagram. People are constantly snapping photos of themselves and their surroundings, however, maybe 1 out of 50 of those pictures actually end up being posted on the platform. We found that the biggest contributing factor to this is the sub-conscience idea of openly tying your name behind a social post that will be shared with everyone they know. It creates almost a hesitation for the user, second guessing themselves whether they think their post is good enough to receive an acceptable amount of likes from their followers.

This app was to function as a new and fun way to gather content from those around you. We did not want to create any hesitation for our users, we wanted to allow them be free to post whatever they felt like posting. This allows for more organic and original content to be posted to our platform. Removing a user’s profile name from the post still provides the satisfaction of sharing something you thought was interesting and allows for interactions with total strangers without any indication of who they are. So far, we have received very positive reviews from our testers and are excited to deploy this new social media concept upon our release.

HOTTUB'S PIVOT

Over HotTub’s lifespan there has been many noteworthy changes to our platform however, there was a single change that sticks out that has changed our platform for the better. Originally we designed HotTub as an anonymous group messaging platform. Users would add their friends into a group chat and not be able to see who was saying what. We implemented a toggable voting system that users would be able to enable within the group and vote to expose their friends. This really makes for some fun times and good laughs with your friends. We got as far as having a working MVP and a road map to add more features such as a geo feed, HotTub’s main feature now.

As a young startup building a system to hopefully be deployed to the masses, it is very important to always listen to your potential users and be open to receiving feedback. When we were discussing with friends and family around us what we were building, we noticed a strong trend. People seemed to be less excited about the group chat idea and way more excited about our roadmaps eventual addition of the geofeed. People were asking questions and updates on it, people really wanted to get their hands on a secondary feature that we planned to eventually add on. This is when we realized we should shift our focus of HotTub to a location based app. We decided that location is what we were going to be known for. Lots of apps out currently out all touch on the idea of location but none really harness it and make it the main focus of their app. Since then we have removed the group chat features completely from our app and focused fully on the concept of location. We still have the potential to add this service back in at a later date since it is already designed and build, but, we want to keep the main idea of our app on location for now. The feedback we have received on our post pivot tests have been overwhelmingly positive and we are excited to see where this new idea around location takes us.

MOCKUPS

HotTub has been through many different design evolutions as our brand has matured. Our target audience for our app is primarily college students and new grads, this is an age range of approximately 18-25 years old. We feel that this target audience is optimal for the growth of a social media based application. From trends we’ve noticed this is where many new apps begin to snowball from. This demographic tends to be the influencing source to younger and older demographics. Because of this we wanted to brand our company towards this target audience. To do this we felt that it would be best to keep a clean familiar interface that will attract users on first sight. This will also help to establish our brands identify as well.

Another user experience design aspect we wanted to shape our app around is the idea that, “Content is King”. The success of apps and websites depends on the quality of content. An app must offer content that meets the demands of users. Users are using the app because of the content it provides, not because of the fancy functionality. Although this can enhance the experience for the user, the content should always be presented to the user in an easy fast way. Your app can look amazing and have all these bells and whistles added in, but if the user cannot easily access the content the user will eventually become frustrated and stop using your app. Content should always be first, we believe that providing unique, high-quality, interesting and relevant content contributes significantly to the success of a company.

SOCIAL MARKETING

Our social media campaign was to be a large way we plan to attract users to our app. From our research we found that users are downloading new apps that they see on social media. Users are already on their phones and within 2 clicks the app can be downloading on your phone.

We wanted to come up with cool ads that don’t just show off the UI’s of the app but also are eye-catching posts that will help us stand out. We decided to play on the HotTub unidentified idea. We wanted our posts to be funny things people might say on HotTub because there is no name associated with their post. We wanted to block out the persons face and have visually appealing recognizable locations. These ads are a lot of fun to create and makes for very quick and easy content to post on our socials.

LOGOS

HotTub has been through many different design evolutions as our brand has matured. Our target audience for our app is primarily college students and new grads, this is an age range of approximately 18-25 years old. We feel that this target audience is optimal for the growth of a social media based application. From trends we’ve noticed this is where many new apps begin to snowball from. This demographic tends to be the influencing source to younger and older demographics. Because of this we wanted to brand our company towards this target audience. To do this we felt that it would be best to keep a clean familiar interface that will attract users on first sight. This will also help to establish our brands identify as well.

Another design aspect we wanted to shape our app around is the idea that “Content is King”. What this means is that no matter the form or function of the app the content should always be presented to the user start to HotTub has been through many different iterations when designing the interface for the app. We felt that keeping a clean theme for our app helps establish our brands credibility.