“There’s nothing to do in this town” and “There are three universities here, but it’s not a college town” are two statements that are frequently said by college students on campus. However, it is common knowledge that there are indeed things to do in this town, the fact is that most people usually do not hear about the events, festivities or savings. Therefore, for this project I want to design an iPhone App that will show all the events/sales that are happening in your local area (so in this case, Abilene). The purpose of the app will be to show upcoming events, sales or discounts that shops are holding, and also places to shop that are site specific to Abilene (or another local area).
After interviewing potential users, the consensus was clear- there is “nothing” to do in this town. The main problem that I saw was that there was in fact events going on and places to go, but no one knew about them. Most people hear about events or things to do in Abilene by word of mouth. In fact, that was the only way people found out things to do. Facebook and Twitter were the main social media cites where people found out about places in Abilene to shop, or events that were going on that week. However, everyone agreed that most of the time, they found out about events being held AFTER the fact. This was a major problem, which I plan on fixing with this new app. The reason why Facebook and Twitter aren’t completely successful is because it’s limited to only inviting friends, even though you can make it an open event, there’s no way to search through events happening around your local area. With this event app, you can post upcoming events and make it public to who ever owns the app on their phone. However, there would also be an option to make events private to limit the guests to only friends.
The app would have features like rating the event or venue and also directions to the hot spots. I want to have the app be updated by third parties that way the “word of mouth” feeling won’t be lost and people can still make personal comments and recommendations for things to do in town. The app would be the “go-to” for college students and would bring about new things to do in town so that people would feel like maybe this IS a college town, they just didn’t have the right resources to find out what to do or where to go to make things interesting.
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