SFnight Overview

SFnight is a master project developed by Monica and Yisong at SIMS, UC Berkeley. The original idea came from a class project at Electronic Publishing (Fall 2000), in which first versions of SFnight prototypes were developed.

The whole project are also supported by three other class projects along the way, including:

We have written a short overview that is recommended for those who are interested in getting a rough idea of our project within half an hour. [SFnight Overview ]

SFnight prototype is partially working, meaning not every link works (so don't get upset if you see a broken link). Here is a list of recommended "adventures" on our prototype:

ADVENTURES AT SFNIGHT PROTOTYPE Prototype For a better performance, we recommend the use of Internet Explorer Search events based on your preferences. See how event search results are presented for easy scanning and how you can narrow down your choices. Add venue/event to "a list to email to your friends" (you don't need to login to do this) · Register as a consumer, an easy and quick registration. View MySFnight page and view personalized homepage. (Login as username: rosa, password: rosa, if you don't have time to register). Try adding events to your calendars or venues to your favorite list. View NETWORK page for players. (Login as username: club nv, password: test.) Update an event or upload a picture. Be sure to check what features you, if as a bar owner, would be interested in

Concept

Powered by a network of nightlife players: bar/nightclub owners, promoters, DJs/Bands, SFnight brings the most intensive and extensive nightlife information and resources to nightlife consumers at San Francisco.

Our original picture for SFnight is only to provide multimedia information on a complete listing of venues and their events with the power of Internet. But as we realize the limitations of revenue models of current nightlife information providers in which increasing revenues usually lead to the loss of information quality and credibility, our project evolve to create a network of players and consumers in which we can lower our cost while substantially adding values to both sides.

Values

SFnight is the first website that target at nightlife players in San Francisco. Through our contacts with players during our structured interviews and survey, we are kind of surprised to know that players are hard-working nightlife professionals and Internet is also part of their lives. Our original suspect on players' capability of using our system was then eliminated. To motivate players to frequent our site, we have developed our site features on network page that specifically cater to players' daily business needs and interests. Besides updating venue or event information, players can:

Compared to our main competitors, our main advantage on nightlife consumers lies on being specialized. All our users needs assessment, including 2 surveys and 1 experimental testing, are very targeted at bar goers: both frequent and non-frequent venue customers. The sufficient study on user preferences and behaviors allows us to design site features that will facilitate nightlife consumers information-seeking behaviors that vary depending on their preferences and frequencies of going out:

Revenue

When SFnight will be the only website that focus on players, there will be very tough competition on consumers market and this is a market where revenues are generated from. Besides local information portal like citysearch, there are specialized nightlife websites, like nitevibe.com, sf-nite.com, etc (view competitor profiles). We expect in the end of competition there will be only one or two main players in the market and the survivor has to the one who has established a sustainable revenue model.

Current revenues model of nightlife informaiton providers mostly rely on advertising as income. Advertisers mainly include record companies, venue owners, promoters, liquor companies, while they can be anyone who wants to target bar goers. These people happen to big money spender on promotion. Promoters usually need to spend big portion of their event budget on promotion (see our detailed promotion analysis). Liquor companies or record companies have large budget for promotion every calendar year. To grab a larger piece of this big "pie", we need to show potential advertisers sufficient reasons why they should advertise on our website. Compared to our competitors, SFnight can add extra values to our advertisers by:

Other ways to increase our revenue include service differention and data licensing fee. With more revenues and lower cost (our tools for players will sufficiently lower our information maintenance cost), we believe SFnight has a much more sustainable revenue model than our competitors and will eventually become one of the few survivors. (see competitor analysis and revenue analysis at Business Plan)

Technology

The current site prototype is developed in Perl and backended by open-source relational DBMS Mysql (including 33 tables). Perl programming is very heavy (more than 11,000 lines of codes), partly because Mysql doesn't support stored procedures and triggers and Perl have to handle all functions. For real development, we therefore highly recommend using larger database system like Oracle or Sybase and believe Perl programming will be relatively light then and site performance will be also greatly improved.

The whole site is template-driven and that allows interface designer and programmer to work independently but well combine their efforts. Cascade-style sheet is widely used across the whole site and assure the site-looking consistency. Javascript also applies on some pages and enable some user interaction on client side. We will consider using XML for backend data exchange in near future and we also think wireless access to our site is not desirable for our project at the moment. (view detailed technology analysis)

Design for audience

We have taken a lot of decisions on user interface design, based on our user needs assessment and group members' discussion (there are many fights between group members in this area, but we are glad we still get along very well), usability testing on lo-fi [paper-based prototype] and hi-fi prototype of consumer user interface. Users (subjects and testers) feedback were very important in our design process: it helped us to refine, repudiate or validate our design and get new solutions and ideas. Some of the design definitions and examples:

Implemtation Plan

We would like to thank you all faculty, students, colleagues, and SIMS staff, friends and parents who indirectly contributed to our studies.

And special thank you in Acknowledges for those who helped or supported this project in its several stages.