Raypointments — Jingya Wu

Raypointments

Background

Making appointments contributes an important part of everyone’s schedule. Currently there are so many ways to make appointments — email, google calendar, texting, phone call, etc, but there is no tool available that can unite all these methods and create a centralized place for people to make and manage their appointments. A successful final product of this project should at least be deployed as a service for the Bucknell community (specifically for appointments among faculties and students), and might potentially be extended to more general use later on.

Executive Summary

To solve the problem identified above, I propose that the solution should at least be a mobile app so that users can carry the application around to use whenever needed and get push notifications to their phone when an appointment is approaching. In order for users to make appointment through texting and phone calls, the application should also be able to access contacts, call logs, and messages, and be able to process and analyze natural language to extract appointment related information from text messages and emails, or even from voice queries if possible. On the other hand, the application should also support appointment reminder in the forms of text, email, and/or phone calls to make it user-friendly for people who are used to these methods of communication. In addition to centralizing other existing methods for appointment making, this application should also allow in-app appointment making. As a appointment making application, popularity is very important, as people will only using it if the parties they are making appointment with are also using the same application. Therefore, intensive research is needed on how to attract users and on in-demand features that existing tools are missing.

Viability Analysis

The first stage of this project will be serving the Bucknell community only. This means that it needs to integrate features that are specifically targeted to Bucknell students and faculty members in order to gain attention from our potential users. This is difficult and requires lots of research work to find useful features that we could include in addition to what Google Calendar is already providing.

Risks and Rewards

Risk for developing an appointment making application is obvious and stated above, that is the application might not achieve what we planned for it if not many people are using it. It might be easier to promote the Bucknell community to use it given that it is developed by Bucknell students, but it is even harder if we enter the public market and are competing with existing appointment making application like Google Calendar. The rewards are also obvious. If this application gained popularity in the Bucknell community, then it can make students’ and professors’ lives much easier by unifying appointment making and simplifying appointments management so that no one will ever miss an appointment again.

Closing

In summary, this application will at least be a mobile app that incorporates as many appointment making methods as possible to provide the Bucknell community a more convenient way to make and manage appointments. At this stage, this project will aid the Bucknell community in a positive way and the risk level remains low. If the application should gain popularity among Bucknell students and faculties, we would then be able to move on to target the public.

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