Archive for ‘Interview Summaries (P4)’

After interviewing a handful of people I came to the same conclusion on all- everyone had found difficulty in either locating a property for rent that met their needs as well as problems with getting in contact with the renter. Another common response and experience was the reoccurring theme of problems with a property or renter after a lease had already been signed. The majority of my interviewees said the most common way they find a property is by driving around neighborhoods in their surrounding area or word of mouth. Everyone agreed being able to see all this information in one place would have made their lives a lot easier. One of my interviewees was extremely excited to hear the possibility of reading reviews from previous tenants dealing with any positives and negatives of the property and of the renter. This would be helpful especially if the landlord or realtor wasn’t really involved with the property and not willing to fix anything or keep up maintenance. Everyone agreed that the ways they have been dealing with finding a house or apartment is extremely time consuming and often a let down. A couple of my interviewees complained that the biggest annoyance was driving around and calling about a property that had already been leased but still had the for rent sign up. One of the people I interviewed, Eric, said it would be of great help to see all aspects of the house (info on rooms, price, etc) before ever talking to the renter.

Healthy Food Near You (name for now) seems like it would be an app that people would use, but most likely by those who have dietary restrictions. Restrictions because of food allergies or because they are on a diet to maintain health. I sent out a survey to 42 people and 22 responded. The following info is based on the answers of the 22.

The biggest conclusion that can be drawn from the survey is that eating healthy is difficult because it is not convenient and is costly. The study showed that it is more important for people to eat healthy on a daily basis, but not on the go or while traveling. It seems to me that on-the-go is the lifestyle of the average person in the United States. People waste so much time and money on fast food when they could learn to make eating healthy less of an inconvenience and more of a habit. Like any good habit, it must be learned. This app would be used as a tool to assist these efforts. Not being informed seemed to be another problem. One person said, “growing up I was not fed the healthiest food so I don’t really know what I would like.” Trying new foods is a trial and error sort of scenario. One has to find what food they like on their own, but along with the location finder it will have a database consisting of what fruits and veggies are in season so hopefully when you’re trying new things, they will be found at their best.

About half of those who answered have or know someone who has dietary restrictions. This app will also have a database of what places that cater to those with food allergies.

As a worker for ACU Athletics, students don’t show up to athletics games at ACU like other universities. Most students know about the football games because we advertise football games more so than other sports teams. So I decided to create an ‘ACU Athletics app’ that shows and notifies students and alumni when games are going on so that they can come to the games. I also want the app to be able to present rosters of the ACU athletes and the visiting team since most people don’t grab the roster sheets. Also if you quickly want to see who the person is and don’t want to scroll through the rosters you can take a picture of the person and the info of the player will come up instantly. Also if students have homework or something and can’t make it to the games, their phones can instantly notify them the score of the game right after the game ends (like the ESPN app). Also, some freshman and non ACU students don’t always know where the sports games are held at so I want to make a map at to show the location of where the game is held.

I surveyed ACU students and some alumni and found out some interesting information such as that most of them do not attend the games because they don’t know information about when the game is held . Majority of the people surveyed wrote they would want a phone application to tell them about the games or some type of text messaging to notify them when games are going on. Another question I asked was what would make students attend more athletic games and most responded knowing about the games and free stuff. What if the app presented notifications of when a game was and the first 10 students who attend the game receive free food or merchandise.

“There’s nothing to do in this town” and “There are three universities here, but it’s not a college town” are two statements that are frequently said by college students on campus. However, it is common knowledge that there are indeed things to do in this town, the fact is that most people usually do not hear about the events, festivities or savings. Therefore, for this project I want to design an iPhone App that will show all the events/sales that are happening in your local area (so in this case, Abilene). The purpose of the app will be to show upcoming events, sales or discounts that shops are holding, and also places to shop that are site specific to Abilene (or another local area).

After interviewing potential users, the consensus was clear- there is “nothing” to do in this town. The main problem that I saw was that there was in fact events going on and places to go, but no one knew about them. Most people hear about events or things to do in Abilene by word of mouth. In fact, that was the only way people found out things to do. Facebook and Twitter were the main social media cites where people found out about places in Abilene to shop, or events that were going on that week. However, everyone agreed that most of the time, they found out about events being held AFTER the fact. This was a major problem, which I plan on fixing with this new app. The reason why Facebook and Twitter aren’t completely successful is because it’s limited to only inviting friends, even though you can make it an open event, there’s no way to search through events happening around your local area. With this event app, you can post upcoming events and make it public to who ever owns the app on their phone. However, there would also be an option to make events private to limit the guests to only friends.

The app would have features like rating the event or venue and also directions to the hot spots. I want to have the app be updated by third parties that way the “word of mouth” feeling won’t be lost and people can still make personal comments and recommendations for things to do in town. The app would be the “go-to” for college students and would bring about new things to do in town so that people would feel like maybe this IS a college town, they just didn’t have the right resources to find out what to do or where to go to make things interesting.

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.

My interview findings were pretty interesting. First of all, they showed 8/10 responses that people tend to go to a theme park approximately once per year. People’s best experiences at the park tended to either be centered around the group of people they were with, a ride that they rode, or short line lengths at the park, while worst experiences involved riding super scary/painful rides, waiting in line for a long time, or super crowded park visits. Those that had used a fastpass to get in front in the line fell at 5/10. Everyone said that they would be willing to take a smart device (iPhone, iPod Touch, Android) to the park if the park offered rewarding services. Some pointed out, however, that this would be contingient on the park offering good free WiFi, while others pointed out that they would not feel comfortable bringing an iPad/Tablet to the park for fear of losing it, not being able to put it in a pocket, etc.

I also asked people what information that they would like to know about a ride/attraction before walking to it. Almost everyone mentioned that they would like to know the wait time. Others wanted to see reviews from park visitors, information/stats on the ride, and ratings in terms of how scary the ride is, how intense the ride is, and health warnings for the ride. Lines tended to be deemed important for deciding which rides to ride, especially for ones that may not be the “extreme” rides that are the most popular at each park.

Most people were excited to hear about the prospect of my App as described, and said they would love to use something like it. When I asked for suggestions for additional features, I got quite a few interesting suggestions. Some suggested having the ability to look at the park in an augmented reality interface to see overlays of information. Others suggested having ratings from the park visitors, others suggested having the ability to look at line lengths, menus, and food prices for eateries in the park. Another suggested having a list of showtimes for various other attractions.

I interviewed people through an anonymous survey, because of the nature of my questions, some people would feel uncomfortable telling me about their medical problems. I need to do some more research about the demographics to narrow down who will specifically be using this app, but my initial interviews gave me some great feedback about general usage.

Most people have daily medications that they take, and with many of them it is at the same specific time every day. There is a wide range of medications so adding lost of medication choices, and entering your own medication with dosage amount and an image would be helpful. Then you would set up the specifications of what time of the day or take with or without food.

Many people have scheduling problems, so an alarm push notification with a snooze would be useful. Online ordering would be another great tool that the app would do.

I interviewed a total of 12 people because the first 2 people I interviewed don’t go camping.

The first thing I found is that everyone i interviewed doesn’t have cell service when they go camping.

I also found that often they are plagued with closed roads and trails because of natural fallen objects across said roads or trails. When I asked them if there was a way to save that point on a map on their phone while offline so they could send it to the forrest service, would they ever use it and would it be helpful. 7 out of 10 said yes.

Some other people said it would be nice to have a social networking-esq app for outdoors people so they could share sweet trails and camping spots that they have been to, and they also thought that a feature to pin where dangerous wildlife has been spotted would also be useful. Since once an area becomes popular bears are usually soon to follow.

Of my 10 people 2 were hunters and they said that a app to show were lots of wild game had been spotted would not be used by either of them because it takes to trill of tracking out of the equation.

My proposal is to design an application named “Urban Runner”.  Essentially the idea is that this is an application geared to those that run. The main purpose of the application is to pinpoint a start to finish route based on your current location or even any GPS located starting location. But from where ever you are or wherever you intend to be the application would map out a route of your chosen distance and terrain. Individual users can create accounts that also act as a social network with friends.

The demographic for this application can be very diverse but primarily geared toward those who are avid runners and enjoy exploring new places to run. This particular application will have a friendly social aspect to it.  It will serve anyone from the range of  those who enjoy running as a fun fit pastime to those who are more serious runners that want to test their limits on all types of terrain. This will primarily be used on a mobile device but would ideally be formatted to other screens to update profiles.

The interviews served to be very helpful in determining key points to include in this app. Many people if not most people view safety as a big determining factor in where they run. This application will allow those who typically shy away from unfamiliar routes to try something new because safety will be taken into account. There will be levels of safety for any route inputted and saved based on many determining factors such as traffic, terrain and elevation, and access to emergency assistance. A rating system will be set in place so the user knows what they are getting into when they begin a route. One positive experience people often enjoy is running with friends and how motivating and uplifting that can be. The application will have to have certain social aspects in place to facilitate and encourage this. There will be a news feed in the profile and users can post group runs so that several people can run a route together. Friends can share routes with other friends and through GPS navigation can allow friends to see their location while running a route.  Another thing I found in my interviews is that people enjoy the idea of planning a route to go and get coffee or do another activity, the application will utilize Google maps navigation system in order to search things such as coffee places or restaurants so that they can be planned in a running route.