[SERIES CHILL 2] A discussion with our Users, key findings and our plan

To keep these slightly concise and infrequent, I decided to wait a bit to write the second article of the series. The first can be found here.

This article will talk about the following;

1. What were our key findings from our user interviews?
2. What is the potential of ClassHill?
3. What plan did we concoct and how are we going about the Fall 2020 semester?

Key findings and potential to be something:

After conducting interviews with 8 active users, 1 non-active user, and receiving survey-based feedback from 56 others, we came to realize quite a bit about the market, the problem, and whether ClassHill could solve the said problem.

When I initially built ClassHill, the goal was to allow students to easily find COURSE groups and let them connect with others from their classes. One of the most important findings from our interviews was that our users were generally struggling to find ANY and ALL types of groups at university.

For example, they didn't know which Student Groups existed around them and how they could get more information on them. Also, what kind of casual groups (e.g. snowboarding club) existed and how they could be joined was another thing brought up again and again. It seemed that users were especially interested in connecting with like-minded people from and around the campus. This was an interesting thing to see because the premise of ClassHill being an "educational" tool was no longer as concrete as it had been prior to these interviews. Although the need for it being an educational tool was also seen.

We decided that due to this we would shift our marketing tactics to allow more socialness to the platform. We also went ahead with two new features to support the idea of a slightly more social, but still an educational platform.

While that was one of the key shifts in our strategy and features, we also used our interviews as a basis to improve the UI/UX as we picked up on some key mentions about the struggles users faced.

One of the biggest mentions that came up again and again however was the relatively low-adoption rates of the platform, that forced existing ClassHill users to find alternatives in the form of group chats on Facebook/Messenger or servers on Discord. This, I truly feel is something that cannot be fixed with features. It has to be combatted with marketing.

But this abandoning of the ClassHill platform was even more important when we noticed that our users had been adopting Discord; a platform that enables gamers to connect with each other, just like we enable students to connect with each other. This was extremely important as we found the following;

1. Users found it important to be able to have organized communication regarding their courses (via channels)
2. Users found the restrictions (i.e. the limit of users in a group) of Messenger/Instagram/Whatsapp to be a hurdle in their daily communications
3. Users found it hard to find these group chats, be it on FB or Discord

This not only strengthened the case for ClassHill but showed that if executed right, there was indeed the potential to become a singular tool for University students. We went ahead and ensured that we could meet the user needs by patching the v2 platform and rolling out the v3 by end of July.

August is for Marketing

We've decided to ramp up our marketing efforts with a potential $10k budget for the Fall 2020 semester. Our goal is to target students at Ryerson and UofT, and nearly bombard them with ClassHill. This bombardment is mostly to take "mind share" so when students think of creating a group to have discussions about their courses, residences, or extracurriculars, they think of ClassHill.

This budget should allow us to prepare an effective social media campaign along with a word-of-mouth campaign to reach out to student groups, who will then be our way to students attending their respective faculties. We've gotten emails of nearly 1000 student groups from UofT and Ryerson, and reaching out to them is going to be a key part of our strategy to spread the word.

This strategy seems slightly more meaningful now that student groups will face an unexpected new challenge in Fall 2020, due to the conditions brought forward by COVID.

COVID has essentially taken most of the educational system to virtual classes, and because most students will be attending classes online, the student groups will find it difficult to reach out to students to recruit, educate, and to serve in general. However, if student groups can find a single place to hangout, online, then there will be slightly fewer roadblocks preventing them from getting the job done. Hopefully, we can enable such communication and become the place for them to interact with each other, their faculty, and the university.

COVID is at the center of this entire marketing and development. It is something that can accelerate our adoption, and there is no better time for execution than the month of August, as we are well aware of the fact that Fall 2020 will be online, and Winter 2021 still remains questionable.