Whispers SG (CS3216 Final Project)

Introducing Whispers SG - An Anonymous Social Media Platform

Have you ever wanted a place to share an interesting story, ask for help, or just get something off your chest, but didn’t want to let others know who you are? Whispers SG allows you to do just that.

Whispers SG is a privacy-focused anonymous social network that promotes authentic and honest sharing without fear of judgment. An online safe space where you can experience a new kind of freedom on social media with interesting, intimate stories 😲, light-hearted memes 😂, and exciting polls 📊.

Whispers SG was awarded top project in the CS3216 module during the 19th STePS, NUS School of Computing’s largest public project showcase event.

Many thanks to my amazing, talented, and most importantly, driven teammates for bringing Whispers SG to life! We are also very thankful to Yangshun for his guidance, especially on the product development and marketing front!

What are you curious about? What stories do you have to share? Check out Whispers SG (whispers.sg) today!

Whispers SG Promotional Video

Whispers SG Feature Showcase

Whispers SG Feature Showcase

Personal Contributions

My contributions to Whispers SG are as follows:

• Product Manager
  • Coming up with user requirements with our mentor/client, Yangshun (founder of NUS Whispers)
  • Conducting user testing and design iteration
  • Agile project management
• Front end development using the following tech stack
  • Tailwind
  • Next.JS
  • React
  • GraphQL
  • Relay

It was a difficult yet immensely rewarding experience to be able to go through the entire product life cycle, from conceptualisation in design, to fast-paced development, and eventually bringing the product to market and doing user acquisition. All this in just 7 weeks!

Reflections

I had an absolute blast during CS3216 as we were given the space to learn about the design process, which is a vital but often overlooked aspect of product development, especially amongst Computer Science students. Whispers SG is a cool application simply because we’ve tested it repeatedly amongst users and firmly believe it can bring value to real people.

Through developing Whispers SG, we’ve come to understand the importance of knowing your users well, and that following through on feedback is not necessarily easy. The four of us recall the trauma of spending a week developing and pitching our idea of a mutual-aid focused platform, Oasis, only to have it repeatedly put down by the friends we interviewed. In view of how we were falling behind our projected schedule, it was a scary decision to make the jump back to Whispers SG, but ultimately the right one. Having the courage to truly listen to your users and pivot if necessary, was a tough lesson learnt in the early weeks.

As developers, as much as we would like to solve all our problems and attract our users by building cool new features, the reality is that marketing and user acquisition is a non-negotiable step in building our user base, and shaping user perception/behaviour. Very frustratingly, what brings people to a social media platform is the content. And we’ve found that in the early stages of a social media platform, this is really difficult to automate! The team had to put on various hats to come up with marketable content for the platform, which pushed us to experiment, learn and make mistakes fast.

The greatest fulfilment in doing this project has been seeing real users find utility in Whispers SG, when it becomes a safe space for them to share their stories and views without fear of judgement. These moments make us feel like we’ve empowered our users and created real value for society.

We believe that there are many more safe spaces to be created and more discourse to be enriched by anonymity - a bright future lies ahead! We can’t wait to see what comes next for Whispers SG.