COIN TOSS

Choice paralysis is a common phenomenon everyone experiences in their daily life. Be it which social event to attend or at a restaurant ordering dinner, we are loaded with millions of options that drive us either to a safer bet or often times a regretful decision. Coin Toss is an intelligent tool that models a user's personality and preferences based on facts, user behavior and global consensus to help the user in making daily life decisions. Coin Toss is a post graduate capstone project currently in the prototyping stage.

Project Guides: Mark Kroeckel I Erin Hersey I John Henry Boudreaux

Project Scope

Topic Selection

Oftentimes I find it hard to make a decision without having a mini brainstorming session in my head. So of course thesis topic identification was a challenge in itself. To maintain my sanity and land on a topic I am passionate about, I begin topic brainstorming by setting the following three constraints.

Pick a first world problem, because it demands an innovative solution.
Take advantage of my current resources. #NYC #Parsons
Pick a problem that people can relate to immediately.

From the mini topic brainstorm session, I land on F.O.M.O. short for Fear Of Missing Out. I begin by putting together a project brief that identifies the scope, user target, research methods, resources, timeline, etc,.

Project Brief

Research Methods

A US millennial spends an average of 2 days a month on social media and are therefore more susceptible to experience FOMO. To better understand the context and the extent of FOMO's influence I took to the following research methods.

As of June 2015, Millennials, or America’s youth born between 1982 and 2000, now number 83.1 million and represent more than one quarter of the nation’s population (United States Census). Therefore I land on Millennials as the prime research target.

Key Insights

Prototyping

usecases and eliminate certain unnecessary features. The user experience was simulated using the Adobe Invision prototyping app. The final phase was the visual design of the app which helped in defining the look and feel of the app.

I begin by mapping out the architecture of the app and derive at a user flow that is inline with the research insights. A quick user map using coggle helped me in drawing out very basic paper wireframes. User testing the wireframes gave a better understanding of the

Product Pitch

I had the opportunity to pitch cointoss in 3 minutes to an exciting audience at Thoughtworks. The positive feedback I received pushed me to work further on the app. I teamed up with a Machine Learning engineer from Columbia University and started to build the beta version of cointoss. Below is the pitch which highlights the problem of choice paralysis and how Cointoss eliminates the stresses of it.