Could you rescue your friends from Boredom be telling them about great Places to Go and Things To Do?
That’s exactly what the new Plings Bebo application invites young people to do. Built by social web developers and user-centred designers Neontribe, the application has just gone into public Beta, which means, if you’ve got a Bebo account you can find and start using it here – even though it’s not yet in the Bebo apps directory.
Tell Boredometer when you are bored, and then shout out to your friends to get help finding something to bust your boredom. If you live in an area where Plings is active then your friends will be able to suggest actual activities for you to take part in. If you live outside the 22 local authority areas where Plings is currently up-and-running then you’re friends get to choose fom a range of general activities to suggest.
Of course, if your Bebo friends are not the helpful kind then you can also use the ‘help yourself’ button to find activities that will fill your boredom directly.
Harry Harrold from Neontribe explained “It’s one of the most social applications we’ve produced so far. We’re keen to see how this can help young people to get involved in more activities.”
The application will come out of Beta, and be available in the Bebo applications directory towards the end of the Summer.
Building Boredometer: From idea to application
We knew from the start of the Plings project that exploring the potential for promoting activities through Social Network Sites was going to be important. Last year we carried out research to lay safe-and-sound foundations for building a Social Network Site application, and earlier this year we started working with Neontribe to design the application.
We didn’t hit upon the Boredometer idea straight away. At the end of our first planning meeting (which involved a surprising amount of drama games and pretending to be Bebo applications to work out what sort of personality our application should have!) we had generated over 70 different possible application ideas, and narrowed down to five or six candidate ideas.
Our first planning meeting was a partnership between the Plings team, Neontribe and a number of young people – but Neontribe then took the youth engagement further by running workshops with groups in Norwich, including young people in a local Pupil Referall Unit, where the idea of Boredometer really began to crystalise.
Harry again: “We found that the overwhelming thing young people said about their lives was that they were bored. It was almost a badge of honour. But at the same time, helping your mates was also really important. So the idea of Boredometer emerged as a way of displaying your boredom, but also helping friends with theirs.“
From design ideas – we quickly moved to paper-prototypes. Not a line of code was written until the general concept of the Boredometer was tried and tested on paper.
After testing the application on paper, development was soon underway. And of course, there was a lot more testing. We invited back Suki who had been at our original developmet meeting, and two new young people, Miles and Alex, to explore and test the first version of the application live on Bebo, and their ideas fed into a further round of development – leading to the ‘Help Yourself’ feature being added in, and a lot of subtle design changes.
Finally, earlier this week, the public Beta of the application was launched.
And of course, as with all things plings, it’s still just starting. Now we’ve got to explore taking the applicaiton out to local authorities with information in Plings, and learning about how young people use it to see what we can discover about the potential ways an application like this can lead to more people going to more activities – and more boredom being busted.
