WineMoms will be a mobile application with the purpose of providing suburban moms a platform to engage socially and seek support from each other. Suburban moms face a myriad of challenges, from the feeling of isolation to lack of social connections, which could potentially result in chronic stress and countless mental health problems. WineMoms seeks to foster a network where mothers can openly discuss their passions and hobbies, share their experiences, and get support from or meet with other mothers who can identify with collective issues. Out of the three zones, we decided that we would work towards Zone 1—coding a functional application. We aim to have five pilot users from our target market of suburban moms to test the final design and see the potential of our social network.
Users will be grouped into different subcommunities based on location and topic of interests. These subcommunities could be private or public, with some examples being : California school district parent associations, floral arrangement enthusiasts in Arizona, or even small friend groups hosting a wine night every Friday. Each group will have content moderators that enforce injunctive norms stated clearly within the community, while regular members will have the ability to post, like, and comment, thus establishing descriptive norms to guide how newcomers can interact within each subcommunity. This hierarchy follows the contribution pyramid many social platforms implement, utilizing a small portion of heavy contributors (content moderators), a reasonable amount of intermittent contributors (content creators, community engagers, reactors) and a majority of lurkers. However, we expect the contribution pyramid division to be different per group, as smaller subcommunities have the potential to have a higher percentage of heavy and intermittent contributors. Our design also plans to target both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in order to encourage lurkers to climb up the contribution pyramid. Our primary hook will be the intrinsic reward of social engagement and meeting other moms, and later in a user’s WineMom journey, a points-and-badges system will extrinsically motivate them to reach the next contribution milestones.