# Project Proposal Sending Letters
### Team Members | CS98 23W


## How Might We Question / Problem Statement
*What is the problem you are aiming to solve? This is not the solution, that goes later.*

How might we create an experience that allows people to communicate meaningfully?

## Stakeholders
*Briefly summarize who are all the stakeholders? These could be users, partners, admins, founders, etc.*
The stakeholders include:

Users:
* Frequent social media users who want another way to communicate with their friends.
* Social media users who want to slow down.
* People who wouldn't necessarily download the app of their own volition, but whose friends or partners are using the app.
* People who still handwrite letters, but are techsavvy enough and willing to move to the app.

Competitors:
* Competing messaging platforms like GroupMe, iMessage.
* Traditional letters sent through mail services like USPS, UPS, FedEx.

Founders:
* Us, the CS98 team, are stakeholders as the developers / founders of the app.

## Proposed Solution
*Briefly describe your proposed solution. How does it work and what does it do?*

Our application will allow users to send letters online in an authentic and intentional way, potentially in their own handwriting. Users will also have an account system where you can send, receive, and see a letter history.

## Prior Work
*Briefly recap any particularly relevant sources from your state of the art research.*

If this product is to offer something new to the existing market, it must provide something new / different from:
* E-card and email services, like BlueMountain
* Text messages and handwriting feature on Apple Messages
* Handwriting apps that allow you to make your own font (e.g. Fontmaker)
* Also scientific methods that allow you to straigthen out handwriting or detect user specific spacing between different letter combinations

## Impact
*Explain how a solution to this problem meets a real-world need. Does it have a broad potential impact?*

Our product helps people build and maintain quality relationships with their friends and family. The project will unify the meangingful connection behind a handwritten letter and convenience of a text message (but encouraging a longer, more meaningful exchange than a simple text).

## Success Metrics
*What are your ultimate success metrics? This could be changing one person's life for the better, or getting 1k downloads, or some performance threshold.*

1. Make an app that we love and will actually use.
2. Get at least 1 download on the app store from someone not associated with the development team.

## Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
*Briefly describe your MVP features. Don't get bogged down in details, this should be a very terse list. What is the critical thing your product needs to do to be special? Build this from your User Personas.*

- the MVP is described below in "Term 1 Validation"

## Validation
*Explain how you plan to test/validate your product. Propose a term 1 and a term 2 validation idea. This can be different things depending on your project: user testing, or usage analytics, or performance characteristics. It can be done via surveys or in product analytics, or other performance measurements.*

Term 1 Validation: MVP. We will have a basic handwriting-to-text conversion (possibly looks like Comic Sans) and the ability to send and receive letters on the app.

Term 2 Validation: Able to add at least 1 stretch feature, for example, widget integration for iOS. We also want to add customization features that allow users to make each letter more personal.

## Implementation Challenges
*What development challenges have you thought about so far? Identify any risks and briefly discuss possible workarounds / alternatives.*

* Expo vs React Native CLI (you can eject apps from Expo to the latter, but not the other way around) -- Expo will not allow native code, which might end up being necessary for something like handwriting code. But React Native CLI is a bit more difficult to use/set-up.
* Creating handwriting fonts which actually looks like the users writing / limiting uncanniness.
* Making sure the onboarding is not too long -- should there be default handwritings?
* Making handwriting realistic or at least personable.
* Hooking up React frontend to backend.