15A

Interviews:

Ronnie: UF student, dog owner

Carol: single mom, dog owner

Kristen: UF student, dog owner

I gave my interviewees a list of potential features that my app could offer and told them to pick their five favorite ones. There was a bit of overlap in what people chose. The feature that all three of my interviews listed as one of their favorites is the verifiability feature. This would make it so that anyone using the app would have to get verified first to make sure that they are who they say they are. This is an important feature when meeting people in person who you found on the internet. The next two features that were listed as favorites in my interviews were a dog park group where you could see who was at the dog park before going and an owner matching feature so that you could meet people who you had a lot in common with. Interest in this last feature really changed the way I have been thinking about this app. I have been focusing on the social experience of the dog when I should have been focusing just as much on the owner’s experience. This is especially true since the owners, not the dogs, are the decision makers and the purchasers.

A feature that I thought would be popular that wasn’t was being able to anonymously rate other dog owners after hanging out with them, sort of like on couchsurfer. However, not one of my interviews liked this feature.

I also asked all of my interviewees what type of phone they had. Two of them had Apple phones and the other had a Samsung. Based on these interviews I should try to put my app on the Apple app store. However, I would like to ask this question to more of my potential customers before making a decision.

Overall these interviews were probably the most helpful to date. They helped me to realize that I should be targeting the decision maker/purchaser with my product and not just making it all about the dogs. If I were actually going to launch this app then I would definitely want to conduct more interviews like these ones.