Remember when I told you about ClubAid? If you don’t, you should definitely click here and go read about it. In my previous ClubAid-blog I said I was going to keep you updated on our progress. Well, here’s the first update.
The past month we’ve been busy conducting our user research. This basically means that we observed our target group in action and interviewed them so that we could get a good idea of what they would want and need from our app. Of course we already had a pretty good idea of what we wanted the app to do, but we needed to make sure that our potential users felt the same.
Luckily, our observations did not differ much from our expectations. We saw that people had some trouble making their way to the bar through the crowd, found it difficult to convey their orders to the bartender (especially with a lot of different and/or mixed drinks), and paid with larger bills, because they didn’t know how much their order cost. We also found that people use their mobile phones a lot while going out; they send text messages and use social media to stay in contact with each other.
Next, our interviews with the bartenders yielded some interesting results. There was quite some difference between the bartenders who work in small-town cafés and those who work in larger clubs in the city. The small-town bartenders were a lot less enthusiastic about our idea, since they experienced less of the troubles that our app aims to solve. So we’ve decided that we should focus on larger clubs in the city only.
These and some other great insights have helped us to focus on what the actual problems are that our target group experiences. The result of our user research is a renewed problem statement that will guide us in the next phase of the project, the actual designing of our app. Our problem statement is:
Design the interface of a smartphone application that allows for easy, quick, fun and safe ordering of and paying for drinks by Generation Y club visitors as part of an ecosystem to improve the drink-ordering procedure.
If you are interested in finding out how this process will continue, or my other experiences with discovering corporate communication, please click the follow button for regular updates, or follow me on Twitter.
See you soon!
Sandra
