Top 10 Findings (So Far…)

Introduction:

The following is a list of raw findings from user interviews over the last two weeks. My findings list as it is presented here are not in the form of insight statements, which I hope to have done for next Friday’s presentation. However, they are a raw set of things that I think are particularly important to the development of the product solution.

The infamous Richard Simmons hyping people up to get their work out on.

Findings:

1. Moms who spend a great deal of time at home are often looking for a way to get a short 10 to 15 minute work out achieved at home, when they have free time. If there was a way to turn the stairs into personal training experience or dancing stairs that was something that users were very interested in. They felt like people often buy work out equipment (like a stair stepper) that never gets used and why not use what they already have to meet that need.

• The idea of gamifying stairs was interesting to users, but most homeowners felt that perhaps their kids would be more interested in features like that then they would be.
• However, one participant brought up a very interesting idea of turning the stairs into her personal trainer so she can get a 10-minute work out.
• During my literature review I learned that if I could get a user to walk up and down stairs for 11 minutes, I could elicit cardiovascular adaptations. Improvement in cardiorespiratory fitness of the magnitude shown in this study should reduce risk of mortality by about 20%, reduce risk of heart disease and diabetes and therefore may have considerable implications for public health policy.

2. Price and peoples available budget are a big factor in if they would adopt a light IoT product in the home and making that purchase would require a fair amount of deliberation between house mates or life partners.

• A stair light product they would imagine going into the market place would be $50 to $100, with out knowing more.
• A product that had advanced functionality similar to what we propose they would want it to cost between $400 and up to $700.
• Being transparent around component cost of raw LED’s where consumers might purchase them and doing some of the early stage research in presentation of the product was something they felt like might be of interest to them.

3. Mobile notifications people don’t seem too moved by and they wouldn’t change their behavior with a reminder to do the behavior. It is as easy for them to not do the behavior, as it is to ignore that notification or reminder.

4. Goals are key to changing behavior, not simply focusing on the behavior people want to change. If people have a goal they want to meet, their motivation changes more then it does simply looking at a task they already know they don’t enjoy.

• Peoples motivation changes when a goal is brought into the fold of a notification, for example users told me that if they were reminded in a personal way about a goal they wanted to achieve and were invited to that through a message or notification then that would be something that would get them to engage in that behavior. The justification is that they are looking for excuses to meet that goal and really even a mention of it would get them to focus on it in that moment. In one example. “If my hot tub messaged me and said, ‘Hey its been a two weeks since you have been down here, doesn’t a hot tub sound good? I would totally make it happen.”

5. Edge case users (people who have no choice but to ascend and descend 10 stairs or more, every day) often don’t do things they need to do on the other side of their stairs, because they are aren’t interested in putting out the effort.

• To quote them, they are too lazy to do it. They will often not spend time in places they want to be, do things they need to do, and sometimes even not hang out with people they want to hang out with because their stairs and going out seem like too much investment of their effort.

6. The stair lighting of most of the people we talked to is poor and if it isn’t poor it’s a flood light situation that is really bright. This bright light can often time wake up children in the home or people who are sleeping, so using the lights at night especially late at night is a of some concern.

7. Users who buy light products want them to fluidly connect to other products and they would go to bigger companies to look for solutions, because they would hope to find things that all speak to one another.

• There were considerable pain points discussed about how most IoT products all have their own app. They felt like often times those apps. weren’t very good and they certainly didn’t talk to one another, which made them not that easy to use.

• Having lights that could all turn on together or that could change together was something that was noted as important.

8. I spoke with one subject matter expert (a lighting designer) and she noted that the elderly area a group that has a hard time traveling stairs and making stairs easier to see would be very beneficial.

9. Home owners often do a good amount of handy work on their own home, but they often call in a specialist to do work for them on water heaters or electrical and that is someone who they consistently work with.

10. Feeling afraid of falling, getting hurt, or feeling lazy are enough of a reason that people will not spend time in their yard even if they have invested considerable time and money making the space the way they want.

• One participant told me that she has a hot tub in her yard. She has lived in this house for two years and she has only been in the hot tub 5 times in two years, because its more energy then she wants to invest in getting down to it.
• She noted that at her old house the hot tub was by the front door and she would use it almost every day.