Innovation vs Adaptation
Are we providing people with the technology they need or the technology we want?
While coming up with amazing new innovative and cutting-edge projects is great, the most salient question is, is your innovation something that users want?
After Apple introduced its Apple Vision Pros, I had one very big question to ask, who asked for these? In all honesty, the world is already overly obsessed with being on their phones 24/7 and I believe that creating a gadget that allows people to literally always have their phones in their faces isn’t a cool idea.
As a person who runs away from my gadgets on weekends and evenings, I literally shuddered at the thought of my phone being a part of my everyday life in that way. So, did the people really ask for this? And in addition, is this an innovation that is actually needed?
What does this have to do with my AI tool? By the way, if you missed my previous blog, read it here.
The question is, when we come up with these beautiful, life changing innovations and creations do we really test the market to see if there is a genuine need for such a tool? Do we do enough market research to truly understand the necessity of something like this, or do we just do it because it’s cool and hey, no one else has done this yet, so let’s be the pioneers?
I was asked a very important question during my capstone project update to my cohort, and the question was whether I had conducted user surveys or not before considering developing the tool to scrap X for newsworthy posts. And the question took me back to a conversation I had with my team at Magamba Network because my initial concept was to just create an AI tool that would create articles for us. We would feed data into this AI tool and it would create stories for our website.
My team was not impressed with the idea as this was something they had unsuccessfully tried in the past as the AI tool altered original stories. That’s what then prompted my question to them, “ok you are anti-AI but what AI tool if we had to create one would you appreciate,” and that was when a colleague suggested the AI tool that could scrap X to help collect useful insights for our reporting. And this is the project we are running with with the hope that it will genuinely help the team to react faster to breaking news and create engaging stories around topical issues.
I believe it’s great to think big and try new things but I have, through the Innovate360 program, learnt the importance of centering users when developing journalism innovations. This is not to say that big tech companies just create tools for their own amusement and not with enough market research to back up their ideas, but I honestly feel that sometimes both things may be true at the same time. We love to have new things and try out new ideas, but when people turn their noses at it we only have ourselves to blame. Are we asking the right questions when we come up with these savvy solutions? What problems are we solving and how do they contribute to the bigger picture and the betterment of lives of our communities? To find out more about my project follow my medium blogs here.
