Evaluate Mode Blog

The evaluate mode experience was very helpful for our group. Jenna lives in a retirement community, so she was able to set up a focus group with some of her neighbors. The neighbors came over for dinner and talked for a bit and then we got the focus group started. Some had already written down their thoughts on how they would create a solution to our problem statement because we had sent it to them prior to dinner, and some had not. Therefore, we began by handing out our problem statement and asking each individual to write down ideas that they thing would help solve the problem. A few were apprehensive and were not very creative at first, saying that they weren’t sure how to solve the problem and did not have any ideas. After I explained that any random thoughts or ideas are encouraged in a focus group because although these thoughts may not solve the problem these may stimulate ideas in others, the group started to loosen up. After we gave the group some time to write down their ideas we talked for a while about their solutions and then started to discuss their retirement community in general. After this we handed out each individual a packet that had different screens within our app. We explained step by step how our app will be used until each person had a solid understanding of how it was setup and its capabilities. After finishing our introduction and explanation of the app we got into our script. Because we are creating an app which is obviously more useful in the hands of tech savvy individuals, coming into this focus group, and after the introduction I was nervous that we might not get a lot of useful feedback from a group of older people who would not be people that used our app. As we went through our script though, I realized that I was very wrong. The individuals in our focus group gave us great suggestions and insight into how we could better connect individuals in our retirement community, and were great at providing suggestions about things they would want to see in the app. Having little experience with apps and technology could possibly have been a benefit because these individuals did not know how apps were supposed to look so they made suggestions like adding a button at the top of every screen that could call emergency services. One issue that we came across was keeping the individuals focused on the question. The old people in our focus group loved to ramble on and get off topic, but sometimes this was beneficial because this inspired other questions. This resulted in going off script more than I would have expected, but all the questions that the rambling inspired were helpful and provided useful insight. Once we finished our script we concluded by asking the people who attended to fill out a feedback capture grid. These grids provided even more insight and cemented what we learned. Overall, the focus group that we set up was very useful and beneficial to our project. It helped us update our prototype and our app will certainly be better off because we had it.