October 18, 2023
Testing out a New Feature: The Calendar
Ever since the inception of spark calls, we've been focused on fostering spontaneous interactions. We aim to mimic the casual encounter of two individuals bumping into each other on the street and stopping to say hello. Our current app seemed to do a pretty good job at facilitating this, but scheduling calls or arranging times to hang out remained a challenge. How can someone, anticipating a busy week, inform their friends of their limited availability? Conversely, if someone has a free schedule and wants to see who might be up for making plans, should their only option be to text everyone they know? We wanted to explore solutions to these questions.
The Feature
We developed an MVP of this feature as a web application. The MVP featured a static landing page showcasing some pre-filled events, along with an event creation button that directed users to a Tally form. In the form, we allowed individuals to add an entry for each day and provided the option to attach purpose tags to each activity item. This way, users could indicate whether the event they were adding was an open invitation, a tentative plan, or simply a notice of something fun they were engaging in! At the end of each day, our product designer would tally all the entries and manually update them on the static social calendar on the website.
We shared a link to the site on our social media platforms, and within the first day, we received a over a dozen entries from friends and family. It turns out that friends across the globe are currently involved in or planning amazing things, but there's no dedicated platform to easily share these activities. We maintained this momentum by sharing some of the remarkable things people were doing. To our surprise, this generated a domino and FOMO effect because others also wanted to showcase the interesting activities in their lives.
