Unii.com 4 mistakes learnt the hard way
About Unii.com
Research carried out by unii.com revealed that 56% of dads and 54% of mums check up on their children on social networking sites at least once a month. Hmm, that's bad news for students who spend more time partying than writing essays.
Parents can't access Unii.com, which means they won't be able to do any snooping. Hooray! Some privacy. Unii.com boss Marco Nardone, 24, said: "University is a place where students experiment responsibly, make new friends and find their feet, so we've developed a social network that allows them to do just that solely amongst their peers.
"Most students wouldn't invite their parents to a party, or loop them into a phone conversation, so why should they have to worry about what they might see on social networks?" Hmm, think he's got a point?
The site might actually do the 'rents some good. 50% of parents with children on Facebook had regretted their prying after seeing things they didn't approve of. The most common worrying findings included: inappropriate comments from friends, swearing, drunk status updates, naked or drunk pictures.
Unii.com isn't just about keeping things private. The site aims to help students make the most of university with special pages on societies and internship and job opportunities.
Working at Unii.com
Working at Unii.com was an interesting experience. I left before Unii.com turned to Fling, already some signs that Unii.com was already making some serious mistakes, that would eventually lead to its demise. Here is a list of the main mistakes we made at Unii.com and my suggestions for avoiding pitfalls!
Mistake 1: Feature Overload
At Unii.com we lacked focus. We wanted to provide a social network specific to university students, this meant not only copying all of the features of social networks like facebook, but also a tone of additional functionality like a society management, classifieds sites, posting to different levels (like google circles) and jobs board. There was no limit to our ambitions. However in the end we ended up with a website, which was a rip off of facebook, with many incomplete features, which just confused users as to what made unique from facebook and also made it difficult for us to create a mobile app, with so many features. This is where Fling was born, this was an opportunity to focus on a single feature and do it well, in this case it was an instant chat feature. Sometimes products get too complicated and you have to go back to basics and simplify.
Solution:
Sometimes limitation fan leads to better design. This can mean limitation in terms of funds, but also the limitation in terms of screen size. When one is designing for mobile, as opposed to the web, designers are forced to limit the amount of functionality and thus providing a simpler more user-friendly product.
Mistake 2: Inconsistent Design
At Unii.com the CEO was obsessed with design. As the project manager and tester of the site, my focus was always on getting our developers to focus on the developing the functionality first and next to the visual design. However, the developers spent countless hours fixing an individual instance of where the design was not consistent and then carrying out a brand redesign before any of the functionality was complete. This process was timely, inefficient and costly.
Solution:
Design should never be an agile iterative process. The design including the colours, fonts and main components, should always be designed ahead of time. A style guide should be created and developers must define the styles in the stylesheet, never in the code inline! One of my favourite style guides is that created by Lonely Planet.
Mistake 3: Vanity Metrics
At Unii.com our founder was obsessed with sign-ups. He was desperate to replicate the exponential user growth of unicorn companies and would do anything to make this happen.
Our growth marketer employed the following methods, all to achieve those important vanity metrics:-
Hired a PR team
Sponsored nationwide shopping events
Create viral videos
Paid for fake Instagram & facebook followers
Paid users to use the site and post content
And hosted a student union competition, to get as many users on the site as possible, for £1000!
However what we did not realise was that all this artificially pumping up sign-ups, would have a devastating impact, when we users would sign up only to see ghost user profiles and inactive accounts. What we soon realised was that sign-ups were not as returning customers.
Solution
It’s important to understand how to use Google Analytics and your engagement statistics so that you can understand what your visitors are doing, and work to improve your blog.
Measuring engagement metrics:-
Number of Returning Visitors
Audience Engagement rate
Average Pages
Time on Site
Bounce Rate
Mistake 4: rules of behaviouR
Although, I left Unii.com before it became Fling, I was interested to see their next mistake, when they did indeed receive a lot of traction! As with any platform that allows any degree of anonymity, users can be lead lead to indecent behaviour. Fling soon become a playground for men to harass women. However rather than nipping this issue in the bud, the CEO enjoyed the increased traction and the vantity metrics.
Misuse of app's is not just about inappropriate content posted, but also about users gaming the system, hackers and bots stealing sensitive data and politician paying to fake news to win elections. In all such cases you can not merely trust your customers to do whats best for the system, and sometimes its better to ban or block people from the system in order to keep the integrity and vision of the product.