When you don't know

Results from the Bubbl survey

Sometimes it’s not because you have poor hygiene that your mouth smells, your mouth smells because you don’t know that it does. #deep. And because you use CloseUp. As the person in charge of what students interact with when they use Bubbl, I am like the guy that gets to think of how to improve their experience on the platform. I just didn’t know it was that bad lol. Percy Sledge said that when a man loves a woman he’s the last one to know she’s a fool, that is the case here. Am I weird because I compared a website to a woman?

It was later (a few weeks ago) that I knew. A new user commented on their post that they wanted their account deleted. We didn’t think people would actually want to do that, so we didn’t make it a feature to just delete your account yourself. I was puzzled. “Ahn Ahn why” I asked, they said a few things like how it was dry, the memes were dry and our desperation was pathetic. If they thought so maybe others did too so I decided to ask them. The day you finally realized your mouth stank was when a random someone at a party ungraciously made you aware.

Making decisions on zero data

When we started making Bubbl, March this year just before they said we should go home, we thought we had a great idea “why won’t anyone use this” “e make sense die”. Not once did I stop to ask if this was really something useful. Sha sha, months later the answer is “…idk mehn”. But I have to know, otherwise, we have just been wasting our time. Of course, no knowledge is lost, but time is.

The problem wasn’t just that we had a bad idea, it was that we didn’t test it out. Our ideas of what AUN students wanted weren’t exactly going to be accurate, we were 4 guys doing the same course, Software Engineering roughly in the same year, 4th. And most of us weren’t exactly on the pulse of what is considered “cool”. We made what we thought other people would use because we didn’t know what other people will use. Only now have I bothered to find out.

Surveys

That’s why we prepared a survey questionnaire. I don’t like using the word Survey, because it suggests the information we need is not really important. Recall how often you skip those “survey” emails SGA sends you 💀. In order not to lose people we tried to make it engaging and fun-ish ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Idk if I was successful in making people answer the damn thing. Out of 130-something students we sent it to only 25 responded 💀 x2. That’s ~20%. I acc expected more, at least half. One of our team members said AUN students don’t open emails. That can’t be right nau, so they were missing all those invigorating lockdown stories from President Dekle, sad.

Before looking at the responses I was thinking of how beneficial it might be to go back to my STA101 slides and see what academic experts say is a good way of gathering and interpreting data. But I didn’t care that much lol. Why didn’t I just “know” it. Anyhow sha…

What we found out

We had previously thought about why Bubbl wasn’t doing the numbers we expected, we lowkey knew it was fvcking dry but no one told us like that. The second question cleared all doubts. 72% of the 25 people that responded say Bubbl, in its current state, is useless to them. Welp. 60% either don’t know how to use it, find it dry, or think it’s useless. 44% want to improve themselves, 36% just want to make money. Most of them use Instagram and Whatsapp are on Android and want either the school water problem, cafeteria food, or student mentality fixed.

What to do with this data?

Well, you the reader can use it as a basis for your SGA office campaign idk. For us though, there are some important issues raised like how students want to be able to make their own circle that will resolve sharply. The bigger, less direct issues like having more people on the platform can’t be fixed with code. So it will take more thinking. The survey also opened our eyes to other things students might need and we are working to create teams that will help us make those cool products, hit me up if interested. Maybe Bubbl, as it is, will cease to exist, sha sha something good will come out of it.

Do something

Ask someone if your mouth stinks. Just do it.

Emmanuel Segun-Lean
for Stallion:Review 🐴 💛 🖤