Stitch
Best Poster at CS147: Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction
New small businesses are trying to establish themselves.
Old small businesses are trying to keep up with the changing times.
For all small businesses, finding support, adapting to a new generation, and creating community has been difficult.
Stitch uses an AI matching algorithm to allow small businesses to collaborate on events to attract new customers.
Our project theme centered on building resilience, leading our team to investigate the unique challenges faced by small businesses. Going up and down University Avenue in Palo Alto, we spent hours conducting in depth interviews with a wide range of businesses from a new hair salon to a bookstore opened since the Great Depression era.
Round 1: Business owners & customers
Mark, Bubble Tea Manager
New manager, 6 months in. Watches YouTube videos to learn skills. Feels unsupported and isolated in his role.
Taryn, Hair Salon Owner
Brand-new business. Struggles with discoverability despite heavy marketing; handles everything herself.
Amy, Bookstore Owner
90 years in business. Observes corporatization has disrupted community connections.
Helen, Italian Restaurant
22 years managing. Losing younger customers; no formal network after 40 years of informal connections.
Beatrice, Customer
Shops 90% big stores for goods; frequents small restaurants. Convenience consistently overrides intentions.
Jessie, Customer
High schooler. Relies on peers and research. Reinforces concern about attracting younger demographics.
"You no longer have the ability to form a community among the people who run the businesses."
Amy, bookstore owner (90 years in business)
Round 2
Val, Non Profit Cat Cafe Volunteer
Partnered with Gamelandia for board game night, turned down other cat cafe over welfare concerns. Showed that value alignment is more important than money when considering partnerships.
Prof. Eric Liguori
"Resilience comes from relationships, not just resources." Cited ice cream shop in Clearwater, FL that survived crises by embedding in community events.
We organized all interview notes into empathy maps in Figma, capturing what participants said, thought, felt, and did, then ran affinity mapping across all nine participants to identify patterns and needs. We developed 3 POV statements that solidifed the core tension and challenges that small businesses face everyday. tensions.
POV statements
We met Taryn, a mid-30s co-salon owner struggling to attract customers. We were surprised to see that despite saying opening the salon was her dream, she puts no effort into knowing her community or interacting with nearby salons.
Taryn's definition of success ends at opening day, not at building community or attracting sustained customers.
Taryn could envision her business as a community anchor, seeing competitors as collaborators and embedding herself in the neighborhood.
Selected How-Might-We's
Retired grandmother who shops 90% big stores but exclusively eats at small restaurants. Surprised by her sector-specific loyalty: she genuinely wants to support local, but convenience and incentives consistently win.
She feels conflicted between a moral obligation to support small businesses and the superior convenience and quality assurance of big chains.
Beatrice had a way to get quality assurance and discover small businesses that offer the same level of service as chains.
Selected How-Might-We's
First-time manager, only 6 months in, watching YouTube tutorials to figure out how to manage. Surprised he has no structured support, operating entirely through trial and error.
He feels inadequate as a manager and must rely on trial and error to solve problems instead of drawing on experience or a peer network.
Mark felt validated while being encouraged to grow, transforming his lack of preparation into confidence and motivation.
Selected How-Might-We's
Opportunity: Small businesses need a way to find collaboration partners that share their values to host community events in order to build resillience and discoverability.
After generating HMWs, we derived three top solution directions and ran experience prototypes on each to validate the core assumptions.
AI Collaboration Matcher
AI matches businesses based on shared values, then surfaces relevant events and conversation starters. Tested with Benedict (On-Call Café, a student-ran night coffee shop, manager) using a card-choice prototype. He chose financial gain as the top motivator.
Assumption validated: businesses will act on matches if relevant and low-effort.
AI Milestone & Tutorial System
AI-driven milestone tracking to build manager confidence and help new managers. Tested with Toby (On-Call manager). Stress dropped (4→1 on scale) but confidence and feasibility scores were unchanged. AI tutorials didn't fit On-Call's values.
Assumption invalidated.
AR/VR Scavenger Hunt
Gamified discovery of local businesses via QR-code clue hunt with prize at the end. Three Stanford students visited every location and became more engaged at each stop.
Validated for raising awareness, but doesn't address B2B collaboration. Not the primary solution.
We also evaluated AR, VR, web, wearable, and robot solutions before converging on mobile, the most accessible modality across all ages and tech skill levels, with no hardware requirements, and the only format that natively supports a community social feed.
Competitive analysis
To validate that our solution occupied a genuinely unmet position in the market, we mapped Stitch against four existing platforms. Every competitor addressed parts of the problem, but none combined values-based matching, joint event planning, and a B2B-only focus in a single tool.
BNI
Business Network International
340K+ global members organized into local chapters of one business per industry. Weekly structured meetings build deep trust and generate billions in referrals over 40+ years.
Key difference
BNI is referral-focused across different industries. Stitch enables collaboration between complementary businesses for joint events, with none of the ~$700/yr fees or mandatory weekly meetings.
Alignable
8M+ member digital network
Location-based small business networking across 35K+ US/Canada communities. Free and premium tiers with educational content and discussion groups.
Key difference
Alignable is broad networking. It can feel like “LinkedIn for small businesses”. Stitch specifically facilitates joint event planning with values-based matching, not just generic connections.
Eventbrite / Meetup
Consumer event discovery
Large audiences for event discovery with geographic and interest-based filtering. Easy to create and promote one-off events to the public.
Key difference
Eventbrite and Meetup are designed for consumers and focus on individual, stand-alone events. They do not provide any process for values vetting between participants and do not support sustained partnerships.
Chamber of Commerce
Traditional membership orgs
Established community presence, regular networking events, and connections to local government. Strong credibility from decades of operation.
Key difference
Chambers typically provide broad, general networking opportunities rather than targeted or matched connections. Many feel outdated in their format and often lack modern digital tools.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Stitch | BNI | Alignable | Eventbrite | Chamber |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Values-based matching | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Joint event planning | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Community event integration | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Local business focus | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Digital-first platform | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Collaboration (not just referrals) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Business owner tool (B2B) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Structured matching algorithm | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
We designed three main task flows on 3 different levels of complexity that covered the full collaboration lifecycle.
- Simple task: Send an AI-templated outreach message to a matched business from the recommendations feed.
- Moderate task: Create a formal co-hosted event ('Stitch') from an existing conversation, requiring two-sided approval before publishing to the community page.
- Complex task: After an event ends, log post-event feedback (star rating + private notes) and optionally set as a recurring event, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
Design choices
The five screens in the nav
- HomeAI recommendations by default
- Communityposts
- Inbox
- Events
- Profile
With the AI toggle on, Home shows a comprehensive business profile (bio and historical posts). With it off, Home is a normal chronological feed, timestamped like Instagram.
Lo-fi
Quick sketches to validate the flow with users, and had small business owners navigate all three task flows while thinking aloud. Feedback primarily flagged labeling, the difference between "+ Post" and "Stitch" was unclear, and the Community page was hard to find for event management.
Med-fi
Translated our task flows into ull Figma prototype with consistent visual design. Ran heuristic evaluation with external evaluators that surfaced 34 violations. Most common: Consistency & Standards (10 violations), Aesthetic & Minimalist Design (4), User Control & Freedom (4). All severity-3+ issues were addressed in hi-fi.
Hi-fi: production React Native app
The hi-fi prototype is a fully functioning mobile app. We turned our Figma prototype into a functioning app using React Native code, with a backend on Supabase and an AI layer on top.
Figma
UI/UX design & prototyping
React Native
Cross-platform mobile framework
Expo
Dev environment & device testing
Supabase
Auth, profiles, events, feed posts
Google Gemini API
Values matching + event idea generation
VS Code
IDE
Every time the feed loads on start, Gemini makes an API call to read each business's values statement and bio, then generates both a compatibility explanation and a one-sentence suggested event idea. Supabase handles all backend persistent state asynchronously, including sign-in, profile data, hosted events, and community feed posts.
Lo-fi user testing results
- avg. eagerness rating
- 9/10
- total misclicks
- 5
- avg. clicks per flow
- 11
- participants
- 4
All four participants were small business owners or employees. Strong navigability across every task flow. Primary feedback: labeling needed work, the difference between "+ Post" and "Stitch" was unclear, multi-business message templates were missing, and the Community page was hard to discover for event management.
Heuristic evaluation: med-fi (34 violations, 4 evaluators)
HIGH LEVEL SUMMARY OF RESULTS
Severity Breakdown
- Sev 0: 1 (2.9%)
- Sev 1: 14 (41.2%)
- Sev 2: 10 (29.4%)
- Sev 3: 8 (23.5%)
- Sev 4: 1 (2.9%)
Below is the highest-severity navigation fix (Sev 4), followed by before/after screens for the feed and community pages.
All screens: Sev 4
Feed screens: Sev 3
Community page: Sev 1–2
Values reflected in design
- Transparency: AI match reasoning is shown on every recommendation card, so that businesses understand exactly why they were paired. This approach addresses privacy concerns around algorithmic decisions.
- Accessibility: A three-step onboarding process teaches key features, and AI templates suggestions reduce friction in usage. Guardrail confirmation before sending ensures that user control is preserved (H3).
- Empowerment: The community feed and Events tab allow businesses to showcase successful collaborations, which promotes partnership over competition.
- Trust: Two-sided approval is required for every Stitch event, ensuring mutual agreement.
"Resilience comes from relationships, not just resources. Businesses embedded in communities stayed stronger during crises like COVID."
Prof. Eric Liguori, Associate Dean, Florida State University
Demo Day