Side Project | No-code Development
Building Jobstreet — but for student partner search using no-code tools
Sevisi — Finding Partner for Students is Now Easier!
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Scratching your own itch!
It all started last year — when I participated in one of the biggest national competitions, Program Kreativitas Mahasiswa (PKM). At that time, I was lack of members to build a team because my campus required to find other members with different majors. For someone who has few friends, I find it quite difficult to find a partner outside of my major.
Until one day, someone spread a “looking for partner” broadcast for their PKM team in a student chat group. I also found another sign of this pain point when I saw an online spreadsheet from other faculties that contained a list of teams from their faculties who were looking for partners for PKM along with their required member criteria. I began to feel that I was not the only one who experienced it, but also other students.
Scratching Your Own Itch — Noticing a problem and solving it . First for yourself ✅ and then for like-minded customers ✅
Deeper why leads to clearer purpose
After I observed more closely, this collaboration culture has become a fundamental for students. You must have often heard that other students are looking for friends for whatever it is, such as organizations, events, competitions, or even to make a business together need a partner.
Since the demand from some students has been seen, I plan to create a platform for students to build a better relationship, called Sevisi, where ideas and shared goals are the basis of the mutualism relationship.
Understanding The Problem
The first step is to talk directly to the person who had the problem to find out more about how they solve the problem currently. Knowing that almost every students do not have flexible time to be interviewed because of their busy schedule. Therefore, I decided to do a quick interview via chat messenger.
📔 Read article: In-depth interviewing by Instant Messaging
Finding participants to be interviewed was pretty difficult because I didn’t provide any rewards. Even if there were, participants only answered about 5 questions and after that they did not reply anymore.
Hence, it’s necessary to lessen the number of questions based on priority (for me, it’s 3 questions max.) However, I think it’s enough if I just want to know how their experience was.
The Minimum Delightful Product
A good product is a product that focuses on solving one problem. Therefore, I decided to solve the partner search problem, starting from the scope of the student competition, especially for PKM first. Apart from the clearer demand, the time in product development can be shortened and the features created will be very specific.
The main idea of Sevisi is to prioritize searches in one place which saves more time by cutting out the partner search broadcast process. We also try to help students visually present their written ideas more effective.
The key metrics would be the number of :
*Page visitors, *Idea submitted, *Partner founded, *Partnership succeed.
No-code to the rescue
It seemed impossible to develop a website from scratch as it would take a lot of time, so to shorten the MVP building process, I decided to use no-code tools in the product development. The tools I use are: Notion and Google Form
Why did you choose to use the 2 tools above? In my opinion, these are tools that are widely known by students, in line with one of the UX Principles:
Jakob’s Law — “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
Users have an innate desire for things they’re already familiar with.
Feature Introduction — Idea Card
Sevisi tries to simplify the presentation of each idea by summarizing 15 informations in the current Spreadsheet and then rearranging it into 4 main parts in one personal page to create a clear hierarchy of information based on the importance and priority. Based on our interviews, we also added 2 most important factors that drive student to join a team, the background of the idea and the competence of the team.
Feature Introduction — Quick Filter
One of the main factors in finding a partner, both from the side of the team leader or prospective members, is their shared interest in the same field of PKM that they want to pursue. Sevisi provides a Quick Filter that is placed before the Idea Board as an additional feature to make it easier for prospective members to find ideas & teams according to their preferences.
Check out how the site actually feels like : https://ipb.link/sevisi
Disclaimer : It may not seems like the best solution for partner search problem, but I think it’s a great step to find out what could be improved and what’s wrong with the idea for the next iteration✨
What i have learned so far …
- Shipping a product is hard. I am quite relieved because this idea has been on my mind since my first year, and was only able to make it happen in my third year. My perfectionism leads to my fear of rejection. Thankfully, simplifying the product really helps me in minimizing the risk of failure.
- Lack of product adoption becomes a sign of failure, due to the difficulty of changing people’s habits — especially from the external factor in using the current solution — there are many variable to consider. I’ll try to re-launch for another national level competition events, and more aggressively promoting products to groups of potential user, especially with word-of-mouth approach.