Needfinding
Written by Francisco Mejia
Brainstorming
Throughout the first week of our group project we decided to meet outside of our class time to get to know each other more in order to make our dialogue more efficient. This way we could discuss our ideas with more confidence and understand the ideas from our group members better.
During our discussion we gathered around 10 different ideas that we debated around. The ideas ranged from culinary applications to assemble recipes to crowdsourcing fashion styles. We decided that our main need, the problem we need to solve, was that of limited vocabulary. We found that as students, we are required to read a vast amount of articles with heavy vocabulary that is very specific to the topic. Our idea then became to create a way to allow people to learn the words that surround their field in fun and innovative ways. It is difficult for people to sit with flashcards and memorize terms thus, the solution to our problem is make learning vocabulary for your specific interest fun and memorable.
Interviews
Our group decided to interview people with varying ages. We decided to investigate the age range where people have this problem. We found that people under 35 are very interested because they find themselves having a hard time learning colloquial to their field language. In out interviews we decided to focus on: media consumption (physical or digital), studying methods, learning methods, type of applications that people use, studying with people or alone, and, ultimately, how often do people look-up words again because of a lack of learning the terms. We found interesting data after interviewing over 20 people between all of our group members. The main data we found explains to us that most people who do not read as much as college students do not really find this to be a life-breaking problem but that they would like to expand their vocabulary in a social/competitive way. The younger people we interviewed agreed that the concept of making your own list of words you want to learn is a very crucial aspect. This is because often the apps that are out there only feed you words that they choose, not words that have any particular meaning or attachment to the user. We found that people solve aspects of this problem by “Googling” words that they do not know. However, all agreed that googling words did not mean learning the words. Although most of our subjects did not seem particularly eager to use our idea to solve their problems, they agreed that a fun way to learn vocabulary of their choice was a good idea and often a problem when it comes to writing papers or reading articles for their classes.
Competitive Analysis
We explored the Apple App Store in order to find applications that attempted to solve our problem. We discovered the application Magoosh. With this application we found a key concept that we would like to use ourselves: competition. However, there is no attempt at solving the personalized aspect of our problem. The app does not have a way to make your own list. We also played with the Vocabulary.com app. This app proved to be a form of dictionary that does not have any particular fun aspects to it, it is bland and boring. The app Word of the Day also made it into our list of possible problem solving apps yet, we found that although it has some great features like banner notifications of a word with a definition, there is no incentive to learning the words. We explored more apps and as we went deeper into the list of available applications we found a key similarity between all apps: there is no emergent personalized list of terms the user wants to learn! Here is where our problem exists and the task we want to solve.
