The Completed WAAD with all 15 Categories, made of 15 sticky notes and 107 note cards.
Demographics are the groups of people who currently use the information available to them to find and hear about events. This category will probably not be used in the final project, as there were multiple issues with the findings that can be rebuked by other data gathered.
We found that many people had situations that prevented from attending events. A majority were put into “money barrier” and “transportation barrier”. However, a portion of barriers did not fall into either of these categories. As a result, we created the “current barriers” category. We will definitely use this category for our final project. This category tells us what issues we need to address in our app. For example, someone said that having to navigate to the event poster’s website for information was an extra step they didn’t enjoy. This tell us that in our app, we should offer information without requiring the user to navigate to another source for information. We should give all necessary information.
When setting up the notes, we noticed that concerns about price sprang up enough to be separated from the other barriers. There are enough they deserved to be a unique category. Using this information, we can start adding options for filtering by price options, show alerts for free events, and possibly include promotions and discounts.
This category came about by having many notes that talked about the issues of not having transportation and not wanting to walk. This category will be useful because it lets us know that on campus events should be included in our applications, as freshman will be a big user of the app.
One of the larger patterns that we found when organizing our data was that many people did not feel like they were effectively equipped to know what was going on in the community. The interviews that we conducted revealed that students felt like they had a lack of information concerning events in general, and were unable to find events that they would be interested or able to attend.
The Unenthusiastic category occurred when we noticed that several of the people interviewed had no interest in going to any events on or off campus. This category will likely not impact our final product because we’re designing this app for people who are interested in events around Harrisonburg. If they’re not interested, they won’t download our app.
One huge aspect was understanding the errors that existed with current event information sources. The current board had enough for it’s own category, so using this information we can see that there is a need for it, and that by being up to date and consistently checked on we will provide a unique experience for the patrons.
This category came about because many of the people who were interviewed indicated they had participated in some community events before. Although many of the events they participated in were through groups they belong to such as frats. This category shows us that people are somewhat engaged already. This category helps us to know that it is again important to highlight events by on campus groups.
This category describes the observations and responses about events and locations that are of interest to students and community members. The most notable finding is that the location that got the most attention was one that has a reputation in the community for holding successful events.
This category describes how people interacted with the event boards currently in town. It helps us understand what people are expecting to get from existing event boards, and that in turn helps us understand what they’d want from an app.
This category came about because we wanted to see how people found out about events and the main ways that event info was getting circulated. This category lets us know that the main way people hear about events is through social media or flyers. People are using there phones to find out about events and a more centralized process would save time when deciding what events to attend.
The ‘Currently Up To Date” category represents the thoughts/actions of people who already know what is going on in their area. We found that only a few people knew of events going on soon in the area. This tells us the type of events that people know about. We found that very few people actually knew about events going on in the area. We may or may not use this in our final project. If anything, the lack of knowledge (the small size of this section) shows the need for the application.
This category details the ways in which interviewees have found information in the past, outside of social media. Most of this information is spread by word of mouth and by friends or organizational acquaintances. This tells us that people are more likely to attend an event when they are recommended to it by someone they know.
This category details what people would want in an app about events in the Harrisonburg area. It informs us who would use the app, what they’d use it for, and whether they’d actually use it for its purpose. It also tells us what people expect or would look for in such an app.
The “Do Not Want in App” category represents worries that people have about the app. Some people gave us reasons they would not use the app, so we created this category. For example, someone would not use the app if they got constant annoying notifications. This will absolutely factor into our final project. We will use the notes in this category as things to avoid when we are developing the app. At first it may seem reasonable to send user notifications about every event going on in their area. Knowing that someone would not use the app if it did this, we may instead ask the user to set their notification settings when they first download the app. This category will help improve the user experience.
