[5] Presentation and Feedback
April 17th
In-Class Presentation
After our presentation, we received a lot of feedback from our peers. While we had positive feedback on the intention behind our ideas, we became aware of a few problems:
- People did not understand how our whole system worked together, especially with the ConnectFour spacial activity (where do people get the chips? is a monthly kit necessary?).
- Our cow theme is not strongly implemented and connected to all aspects of our system.
We also talked to Jessie and she brought to our attention a couple of considerations to our design:
- Does the reset activity have to be monthly? Does it make more sense to be semesterly since our semester schedule has a bigger influence on our eating habits?
- Should the user have a predicted baseline before collecting receipts? That way they can teach themselves from the weekly difference whether they are following their goals or not, and why.
- How might the app idea be incorporated into existing systems, such as email, group chats, calendar, etc.?
From these feedback, we realized that we need to refine and edit our ideas.
Reconsidering the brand
- For our spatial activity, using a structure similar to ConnectFour is confusing since users will relate it too much to the game. We want to change the form into something else.
- We will scratch the cow theme if we do not see any genuine opportunities to make it cow-related. Moohoo :’(
Refining the system
Spatial event — To make a clearer distinction between our kit and large scale event, we decided to move away from the table top idea and scale up our planning activity. We want to use the event as a way to spark thinking about saving money on eating. During our event, visitors will be prompted to use a large version of our chip + planning activity, and have a kit as their take-away.
Kit — The kit contains a 7-day planner, chips, and information on methods to save money. People can learn from this system and teach themselves to control their eating habits/impulses.
App— The app is used to help with social planning. Friends can see how often you intend to eat out this week and can coordinate schedules or ask for a smaller/cheaper social gathering (coffee, etc). Provides visibility on who is available to eat. Could also be a chrome extension.
On the visual side:
Feedback from Classmates
Some of the repeated suggestion from our classmates are:
- About the cow theme: people think that it makes money managing more approachable, but it is not really incorporated in our mediums except the milk cartons, so is it necessary?
- About the spatial piece: a lot of people felt confused about our physical because we mentioned “Connect 4”, but we are just taking the physical look instead of the rules of the game as some people thought. Also, some people mentioned that dining areas at school might not be a good idea because most people already have a meal plan. People are also wondering why we made it communal — it seems more like a personal kit thing.
- About the physical piece: since a lot of people don’t have the habit of collecting receipts, people are worried about how it is going to affect their habit / this can be a long term thing. We are already thinking about canceling the “monthly” aspect of it since it causes some confusion as well.
- we generally needs more work on the digital piece.
We ran our idea by Andrew and he also give us some feedback to chew on:
- Our event might be uncomfortable for some people to display their personal schedule, especially since its connected to personal finances. How might we make this space have both isolated (discrete for personal reasons) and shared (public to raise awareness) interactions?
- Social savings club (microfunding)
- There is a stigma about saying something is too expensive and there is pressure to eat out as a social activity. How might we make it okay for people to talk about it? How might we create a social support network for those conversations to happen and help people recognize it is a thing?
- We can make it playful to allow people to feel more comfortable about the topic, but if it’s too playful it can be off putting.
