JoyList - Curated Social Recommendations
/Introduction
JoyList is a unique product concept that merges ideas from Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, and others, to create a platform specifically designed to allow friends and family to exchange curated lists of their favorite experiences. By taking the time to carefully select and add items that have brought joy to your life (as well as your thoughts about those experiences), you are serving as a guide, potentially helping your friends and family discover new experiences to try, things they otherwise might never have known about.
Currently, when looking for new things to try, most of us turn to aggregators such as Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, or TripAdvisor, or algorithm-based suggestions from our content providers, such as Netflix or Hulu. The problem with these approaches is that we are trusting strangers to guide us. While aggregators and algorithms obviously have some merit, they often fall short for a number of reasons – aggregators because their reviews are written by strangers whose preferences may not match our own and in some cases may be inauthentic, and algorithms because they are based entirely on the limited data they are able to collect about us from our usage of their platforms.
With JoyList, all the endorsements you see in your feed are from people you know and trust, and personal recommendations you receive through the app are from people who actually know you. We’ve all received great recommendations from our friends when discussing our life experiences face-to-face. JoyList allows us to access this information on-demand, at the moment when we are trying to plan our next experience. After all, this is the time when useful recommendations from our friends are most valuable to us.
Challenge
Joylist approached us with a challenging plan of creating a responsive app that is fast and user-friendly. As with most start-ups, the exact plans were uncertain at the beginning, so it was important for the development team to be flexible and ready to adapt to the evolving business requirements. A key requirement was to create a platform that would be flexible enough to adapt to a change in requirements in future versions without major development effort. In other words, the architecture had to be carefully planned and implemented so the app could be scaled and modified with relative ease. The plan was constrained by a limited budget and short timeline, so the team at KAZ really had to think creatively about how to meet this challenge.
Solutions
Given the short timeline of the initial deliverables, we focused on identifying the most essential/MVP features and the core concept to reach a software specification quickly. We used this as our guide to build version 1.0 of the responsive web application. We kept the development cycles short to seek feedback early and planned for longer feedback cycles in future versions, at which point the application would be pressure-tested for business viability by soliciting feedback from actual users.
We used a Node JS-based stack for the web application using React as the front-end platform. We used Mongo DB and HAPI for data and leveraged on AWS (Serverless, Lambda, CodeCommit, Code Deploy, Code Pipeline, S3, CloudWatch, CloudFront, CloudFormation, Route53, etc.) to deliver the application faster with the flexibility required without comprising on potential scalability needs.
