I didn’t enter the Evaluate phase with very high expectations. Although my team’s Create phase left us with a solid prototype, I wasn’t sure how our overall concept would be perceived by our focus groups. Getting a new set of eyes on our prototype was necessary for us to continue developing our app, but I won’t lie, it made me nervous. What if everything we’d worked for was shot down? There was a chance that our focus groups wouldn’t even understand what we created, but if they did, what if they hated it? I guess I was assuming worst-case scenarios, but I couldn’t help it. Thankfully, my fears proved unnecessary as our evaluation phase turned out to be a great success. The prototype proved to be well-made and responses to our concepts were “easily feasible, well thought out, and innovative.” Combining concepts from Blackboard and the payment platform Splitwise, then applying the concepts to undergraduate housing is certainly innovative. Thanks to good work during our Define, Ideate, and Create phases, we ended up a successful byproduct of Design Thinking.
The Concept Testing portion of the Evaluation phase went well for us. We held two focus groups and they both …. –Actually…we didn’t have 2 focus groups; we had closer to 1 and a half. My 3 partners held a traditional 8 person focus group that Dr. Luchs instructed us to perform. However, I was unable to do the same. My feedback was still very constructive, but I didn’t do exactly what Dr. Luchs wanted. I’ve got a good reason for straying from instructions. Here’s what went down:
Whether home or away, the W&M football team always stays in a hotel the night before a game. Several days before our hotel stay, I sent a message in our Football team-wide GroupMe to recruit some guys to join me for my Customer Insights for Innovation team’s focus group. I planned on holding a focus group in the hotel. It would be about 9pm on a Friday night, so I was the only moderator. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting many participants outside of my core friend group — about 4 guys — but I assumed that recruiting some others wouldn’t hurt. I was hoping about 2 or 3 extras would turn out, but when we got to the hotel, it turned out that FIFTEEN extra guys volunteered their time to hear me talk about our app (a total of 19 guys). There was no way I could follow along our focus group guide’s questions with this many participants. Half of our focus group guide was an interactive portion, so there was no way I could efficiently stick to the plan without wasting my teammates time. Also, I was so genuinely excited from the huge turnout that I couldn’t muster the courage to turn anybody away. Thankfully, I was the only moderator from my in-class group at the focus group. This lent me enough independence to efficiently adapt on the fly. So, instead of holding a traditional focus group with 8 or 10 guys, I just pitched our design to my 19 teammates and got their feedback. I recorded it all on my phone’s Voice Memos app. They all loved it and had a great time giving me feedback. It was actually so awesome.
The feedback that my pitch provided was incredible. Here were the highlights.
- One teammate suggested we should offer bundle pricing to big apartment management firms that own a lot of apartments and would like to implement Sofa in them.
- Another teammate built off the first idea, suggesting that we offer different levels of our app with more and more functions. We could base the levels depending on the modernization of the apartments or the wants of the landlord. “Sofa” … ” Sofa Gold” … “Sofa Platinum” etc.
- Someone suggested we should pitch our app as something that would “modernize” the apartment living lifestyle.
- The biggest problem that came up was how we’d incentivize the app for landlords to buy it. My group is still deciding how to do this.