The Initial Idea
It would be connected to a gmail account– (could modify it to a facebook account?). App will have access to friend’s list and calendar. The user selects friends they want to always keep on their social calendar and then give them frequency (regular intervals of time the user wants to see them.). Friends can also be grouped if you always see a certain set of friends, but they can be peeled off too.
Interface: A series of concentric circles each with a friend icon sliding on each line (like a track). The grand circle is similar to a clock face but instead of the hands moving, it’s the face, the hand always pointing up. The clock scales with the plans that you have, but can zoom in if you wish. A person with less far out plans won’t see an empty calendar but a differently scaled (large icons) circle.
Active (brightly colored) icons for “friend-instances” or an event planned with a friend. Inactive (dimmed) icons for friend “potential friend-instances” for the recommended slot to see this particular person based off the preference indicated by the interval of time you enjoy seeing this person. And then some other state of icon, “Routine” for standing appointments. So most active icons will have a follower of a tickmark indicating an automatic emailer* followed by a dimmed icon at a variety of intervals indicating the next potential date.
Circle of friends connects users. If a person needs to cancel, they click the friend-instance icon and click the cancel date option which triggers a new email to inform the other user that plans are canceled. The active icon goes away. The trailing inactive icon doesn’t.
*automatic emailer– it emails your friend with a generic message, hey, let’s grab some coffee on this {{date}}? (or some other generic activity you like doing together, indicated in the friend settings)– can be disabled when going on trips, can be influenced by calendar.
Comments by my technical advisor, Myco:
I can see the use of this for someone like yourself, who likes to keep social events flowing so that you can keep in contact with people. For others, this would be a bit of a change for them, to schedule regular meet ups. However I think the strongest selling point for the app is that most people *want* to be more social and stay in touch with people. promising them to help them with that is your value proposition.
If you boil down the concept to its most basic, it would be this:
Get a list of people.
Set the interval for each person.
Remind the user to set up a meeting at the specified interval.
So that would be what you would want to build first. From there, you would expand into the different psychologically useful features:
The circle UI, which is psychologically satisfying for the user.
The automatic emails, which force the user into a meeting instead of procrastinating.
The streamlining of the start process, which helps guide the user through the potentially tedious task of picking out friends from a large list.
Katarina Countiss 