travel app community

September 2016, Rolf W. Eckertz

The development so far was concentrated on the individual usage of the travel app, "work and travel diary", and co-reading in the family. The feedback and some market research led to the following ideas:

• the app must be perfect before it is presented to the public in an app store
• you never have a second chance for a first impression
• fast start 
• excellent performance
• ease of use
• no user manual must be necessary
• no user help must be necessary
• common user expectations must be fulfilled
• secure, secure, secure
• encryption of data stored in the database
• encryption of data transfer
• user identification and authorization
• no deletion, no change, only adding of data
• multilingual and global
• shipment in English and German language
• working with different time-zones
• working with different country standards
• integrated translation services
• always on - so far a login is necessary, that will be changed:
• a cookie will hold an endless session
• the user can finish the endless session (button)
• the app version will be always on, the browser gets the new functions
• save all entries
• perhaps a cookie is a good idea to hold the last entry even if there was no connection and the user did not click a save function
• viral community building
• you need an invitation from a user to become a new diary user
• an invitation is a key that is generated by a user
• the key may be transferred by mail, Facebook-Chat, whatsapp, Skype or other services
• to simplify the invitation the address book of a smartphone or pc can be accessed (will not be possible on all systems)
• within the diary community an email address is unique, it can only belong to one user
• but one user can have two or more email addresses, because he is free to change the provider over time
• an invitation may or may not include the co-reading option

When this is delivered, then the next step can be done: enhancing the travel app to a community solution. What does this mean:

• users can define a community diary
• users can invite other users to take part in this community diary
• users can only read a community diary if they add information into this community diary - "do ut des" or "quid pro quo" are the principles, od: "no output without input"
• all community members can get the updates of others users of the community with a realtime push-service

What a challenge for the future