We believe that every single human is amazing and should hear it more often. That"s why we are building ZenQ: ze way to say thank you and appreciate your awesome friends and colleagues. On your mobile. In zeconds.
Started at Startup Weekend Cluj in March as an iOS-only MVP, the project has grown quickly, with the iOS and Android apps live in the stores since the 7th of May.
How does ZenQ work? Imagine browsing through your facebook friends and endorsing them, just like you do on Linkedin, but this time for their positive qualities (fun, smart, creative). Someone made your day and you want to go further than this? You can find them in the app and leave a special note showing them how amazing they are. In the end, each of us gets a profile where you are able to discover your key strengths through the eyes of your friends. So essentially, ZenQ is all about spreading positive vibes, having fun, being happy.
Behind the scenes, ZenQ is powered by a Django backend which uses the Facebook login information gathered by the clients to collect the user"s friends from Facebook and provide them back to the clients when requested. The list of traits is also provided by the backend service making it easy to update based on feedback from the users. This information is then used to create the user profiles which now shows a list of traits a user has been endorsed with ordered by the number of endorsers.
The "face" of ZenQ are the mobile clients: iOS and Android. The interface uses a very simple navigation paradigm in which it only takes 2 taps at most to get to any screen at any time. Most of the focus though is on the "ZenQify" screen which is the first screen the user sees when opening the app and they can easily get back to it when opening other screens making it the central point of the app. Users can also endorse specific friends by searching and accessing their profile where they can also leave a message linked to the trait they want to endorse for.
ZenQ is a lot of fun to develop and feedback from a few hundreds of beta users has been positive so far. Just a few days ago we made available the new iOS and Android versions. We are looking forward to getting more feedback and learning about what would make users happier and more engaged with the app.
First, we believe that it can strengthen the optimism and positive interactions in various communities, organizations or companies. It happens often in these kinds of environments, that we focus so much on accomplishing tasks that relationships fade and this, on long term, really damages the group strength. In the second scenario, we believe users would enjoy the magical fun and easy ZenQ interaction and will get engaged in this social game of endorsing their friends.
Please visit www.zenq.co to get the app on your smartphone and give us your feedback at contact@zenq.co. ZenQ very much!
by Ovidiu Mățan
