I am working on a sort of “City Hub” for small to medium sized local communities. The principle idea behind the website/app is to address the problem in college towns and other smaller cities where many local businesses, churches or cultural centers do not have any online presence whatsoever, and that it is very hard to find out what may be going on in town on any given night.
Before the interviews I was pursuing a social component to this, similar to facebook pages. Each business, school, church, event, etc. would have its own “hub”, and users would be able to discuss various topics in their respective forums or boards. After my interviews I believe that any social component would be antithetical to the idea of a convenient gathering place for all local places in a city.
My interviews were varied, and consisted of 50% college students/50% young adults or elderly in Abilene. Here are some of the conclusions I came to:
1) One of the most surprising things I gleaned from the interviews was that 9 out of 10 people said they discover new places around town primarily through word of mouth. I had thought at least a few younger people would use apps or websites, but even college students said they heard about where to eat or go to church from others.
2) People from big cities tend to enjoy going out and looking for new things to do in Abilene, and those from smaller or same-sized cities really preferred to stick to the places they knew about.
3) One of the questions I asked was “Have you ever been frustrated trying to find information about a local business online when there isn’t any?” To my surprise, a good number of users said they didn’t get frustrated, but just stopped looking altogether.
This information is really critical to developing a service that provides clear, accurate information and is usable enough by a wide range of demographics. In addition to the class discussion, I have shifted priorities from a ‘discussion hub’ to more of a yellow pages with reviews and media, focusing on local community.
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