GROOPERJack Smillie, Joshua Fashoro,

Oliver Hilton, Thomas Pritchard and Daniel O’Brien

Grooper Software

Who we are targeting Who: Anyone that is organising a tournament, or needing to

group people together. Specifically teachers as they are always putting their classes into groups.

What: Teachers (or anyone) that are trying to assign groups. When: Anytime during the (school) day, or when the tournament

is scheduled for. Where: Anywhere, for teachers it would be in the school area.

For organisers of events it could be wherever they need to use it. Why: Our app makes group assignment fair and easy. It’s very

difficult for teachers to assign fair groups at school. Our app randomises the names, and there is also a function where you can choose certain people to be together, and also you have the option to make sure certain people are not in the same group.

Problem that it solves Assigning a whole class into equal, fair groups is

incredibly difficult and stressful to do, as some people do not work well together. Teachers have to do this many times every day, some now let students choose their own group, just to avoid the stress of choosing the groups themselves.

It can be extremely easy for some quieter children to be left out. This would then lead to them feeling rejected and unwanted. Grooper creates fair groups where everyone is involved.

Question The question that we wanted to address is:

“How do you quickly organise fair groups, without hassle?” Our app does this, it is also user friendly to

make it easier for the users, who might be in a rush, to use.

Key Insight Statements

It’s difficult to create fair groups, but our app makes group making easy. Randomising the groups of names would instantly create fair groups. In addition, the ‘filters’ page means that the user would be able to make the groups even more fair.

Mini Elevator Pitch

My team, Grooper Software, is developing a mobile app to help teachers/organisers assign people into fair groups.

Our app is called ‘Grooper’.

User Profiles We talked to all sorts teachers for feedback of our app. A sports

teacher said that it might not be practical because they pick teams based on ability, therefore randomly wouldn’t always be appropriate.

However, other sports coaches said they would find this app useful so they could organise events in advance. Other teachers said that they would use it in classes and it would help them a lot.

We asked teachers at our school if they would be willing to pay for our app. All of them replied with ‘yes’. Some then suggested that the typical app store price of 69p would be appropriate. A few said they £1 would be ample for a app that they would use frequently.

A new teacher said that it would help them, especially as starting off in the profession is not easy.

Competitors We have extensively searched all of the main

app stores, and we have found no app which is similar to our idea.

However, there are a few random group sorters that appear on the internet. Most of these take a while to process, redirect you to other websites and contain many adverts. They also do not include the features that we offer.

If a teacher is in a hurry, they don’t want to have to wait for the internet to load.

MVP User Stories Our app’s core feature is to randomly assign people

into fair, equal groups. Our app’s core feature gained a lot of positive

feedback from the public and other people that we asked. They said it was ‘a brilliant and original idea’.

We don’t want to overcomplicate our app. If feedback is good, then in the future we could update our app with news ideas. Such as a login screen so you can load your saved lists on multiple devices.

Perhaps we could ask the user to write a review on the app store, so we could easily get instant feedback from our users. We would only ask them once, we don’t want to annoy our customers.

Flow of App & User Feedback Many people commented that our app looks very easy to

use. It is nicely set out and incredibly user-friendly. Like we mentioned in the previous slide, we could ask

the user to write a review on the app store. To avoid annoyance, we’d only place this popup on the last screen of the app, and once only.

Already we have had suggestions to our app, in ways that we could evolve it. Including the login system, like I mentioned before. This would affect the flow of the app, but once you’re signed in, you don’t need to sign in again unless you sign out.

We haven’t included the login idea in our original app, as we really want our app to be easy to understand.

Key Wireframes 1/3

Key Wireframes 2/3

Key Wireframes 3/3

These are only the 3 main wireframes out of our many wireframes

Feasibility

Our app is very simple and would be easy to make. We have learnt that apps should not be complicated and busy. They should do one thing well, and ours certainly does that!

Entering data is also simplified on our app. There’s plenty of designated places to enter names (or even initials to speed up the process).

Business Case & Customer pledges Our Business Model is to start our app of as a free app

which includes adverts along the sides or bottom. However, we wouldn’t place ads that make the app unusable, such as making the user watch a video. This is because we don’t want to cause the user stress or slow them down, especially as our app is supposed to save people time.

We got a few customer pledges from current teachers. All of them said they could see themselves using this app in the future. They would be prepared to pay for the app. Many teachers said that such a little price barely matters to them because the app would save them so much time and stress in the future.

Marketing Strategy We could perhaps place an advertisement for our app

on a teachers’ website so that lots of teachers could see our app. Once a teacher from one school has the app, others from the same school might follow suit. This could help our app spread like wildfire.

We could also place advertisements on websites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are both highly social places. People who organise competitions (outside of schools) could possibly see it on websites such as those.

There are many ways of spreading the news of our app on Twitter, which would come at no cost to us.

Wildcard

We created a website for our app: www.grooper.webs.com

We did this so that users can give us feedback on our app, learn more about it, and freely communicate with other app users.