Preparing & Conducting Interviews for NavigaTour
We were able to pitch our top five start-up ideas to ma'am Angelie last week, and she chose TempTress as the best of the five and suggested that we pursue it. However, after much deliberation among the members of the group, we have decided to pursue another project. While we believe TempTress is an unique and intriguing project with a real chance of success in the business world, pursuing it would require us to invest in the right people to program and manufacture the actual product, which we did not have the financial resources to do. As a result, we changed our direction and settled on NavigaTour – a 2D CDO Malls navigation application that aims to assist customers/tourists in seamlessly and conveniently locating areas (shops or facilities) within the mall that they wish to visit. Following our discussion of all the features we want this app to have, we immediately began gathering information from our target market. And, as discussed during the first week of our Technopreneurship classes, we are not allowed to tap into our family and friends, particularly when conducting interviews, for the reason that may not feel encouraged to provide accurate, honest answers, which I totally agree. This activity taught me that conducting interviews is a difficult task, especially for someone like me who is introverted and who dislikes soliciting favors from strangers - but I thrived and I’m proud of myself! However, the results did help in the development of effective strategies for our project, and I was also able to reflect on features that resonate with the problems of our target market. Additionally, the data collected demonstrated that some people did have difficulty locating facilities or specific shops within the malls of Cagayan de Oro City, particularly those that they visited seldomly. This is sufficient to demonstrate that there is a group of people who experience the same pains when going out to the malls.
By listening to what they had to say, we were able to make better decisions and identify market problems, allowing us to make better decisions to make our application more effective. Accurate mapping, user-friendliness, search and discovery tools, and even a voice assistant feature to assist those with poor vision are among their suggestions. Here's a link to a Google drive with screenshots of the people I interviewed: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xzA3G4porOSUNyPdj5eblBPwDOhcurDR?usp=sharing