I am taking a full stack development course offered by HKUST at Coursera and this is one of my course bonus problems – an Ideation of a website or app. I find it useful and guided me through the process of proposing an APP to be developed, so I post it here, along with my naive solution.

Definition of Ideation

According to WikiPedia,

Ideation is the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where an idea is understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete, or abstract.^[1] Ideation comprises all stages of a thought cycle, from innovation, to development, to actualization.^[2] Ideation can be conducted by individuals, organizations, or crowds. As such, it is an essential part of the design process, both in education and practice.^[3]

Requirements

My Solution

P2P Reading and Making Friends

1. Introduction

I want to develop an app that enables people to share their thoughts while reading a book with another one, and with communication, they will be able to make friends with more people. Unlike the community that Facebook and WeChat or Douban has built, I want a P2P(Peer to Peer) over 1 to many communities, which I believe will bring about more participation and inspire readers to think more.

Expected List of Features

1. To make it more interactive, I think one important feature is that the users will be matched to peers that are in the same city or area as them, so that this online activity will outreach to their real life and thus making reading really inspiring and motivated.
2. Another feature should be about reading people near me, users can make their locations and books reading visible by others so that an offline interaction between users can be really fun.
3. I think a large database about books being connected to the app is also important, for Chinese books, I will use the API offered by Douban and for English books, and for English books, Goodreads will be a great option. These APIs will be helpful for users to share and find books.
4. Providing E-books purchase options for users will be a bonus feature or a feature that can commercialize the app.

Market Survey

This app will be Chinese-reader-oriented, so I will mainly research the Chinese mainland market.

1. Kindle with Weibo. Kindle in China does not officially support Goodreads but supports Weibo instead. Weibo is a platform like Twitter, so everyone follows you will see your reading updates, but the interactions are one-to-many, so the interaction can barely go deeper.
2. Douban Reading. Douban is an app focuses more on personal creation rather than making friends.
3. Zhihu. Zhihu is more like Quora, less reading oriented.
4. WeChat Reading. It is based more on WeChat, a Facebook-like app. It does focus on socializing, but focuses more on reading and mostly share reading thoughts with people that users already known.
5. Netease Snail Reading. This is an app with fancy features, for example, it offers one hour free reading time for users every day, reminding the users the cherish the time for reading and be more concentrated while Reading.

I think my app will be unique since it concerns about the p2p making friends feature of the app and also aims at making friends that really know your inner feelings. Despite the big difference, WeChat Reading and Netease Snail Reading offer a really good example for me and I will reference their design while developing my own app.

References

1. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/33758688
2. https://bookriot.com/2018/11/08/free-reading-apps/
3. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/53727366
4. https://www.zhihu.com/question/55396305
5. http://www.programmersought.com/article/4637105784/
6. https://www.goodreads.com/api
7. https://douban-api-docs.zce.me

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideation_(creative_process)