55 Interviews including 3 Revisits
Great work team! Here's our list of interviewees: Interviewee Document
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Interviewee: John Marshall
Fitness Enthusiast, Developer, Start Up Guru October 11th, 2017 Conducted by: Greg Anderson Why we interviewed this person: John not only fits the target audience as a fitness enthusiast but he also has extensive development experience and has launched startup apps before. I wanted to get his opinion on the wireframes and idea as a whole. We really wanted to understand this: Is the idea viable in the current start-up marketplace? Does it have the “wow” factor? Would he use it? We learned this about the problem space: AI and Machine learning are sexy terms in the development world. The fact that we are basing our logic both of expert opinions as well as learning algorithms has a nice buzz to it. In addition he called out that the less friction we have the better. This is similar to what Mikhail called out to our group in class. There is no need to have the user create a plan, just iterate faster and make the plan dynamically fit to what they are doing. We were surprised by: He said despite him being too lazy to input advice in Strava or MyFitnessPal he would use our application because of the ease behind it. This means we would need to be able to give input even without the user providing us a lot of information about their current diet/training regimen (default mode.) Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): This was the last interview for the group and it’s a good one to end on. The fact that this seems viable and got good feedback from John helps me believe in the idea. Interviewee: Andre Lancour
Training for his first Marathon October 9th, 2017 Conducted by: Greg Anderson Why we interviewed this person: Andre is a Strava and MyFitnessPal user who has just started to train for his first marathon. He fits perfectly into our target market. We really wanted to understand this: How is he creating a training plan today? Is there friction? Would he use our service? We learned this about the problem space: Currently Andre is forming his plan from hours of online research. He is being very careful with his increases to avoid injury. He thinks that this dynamic training service would be great for him and he would absolutely use it. He also suggested that it should recommend stretching routines too. We were surprised by: He really loved the idea that it would suggest what food to eat. Personally I thought this was a weakness of our system as many people will eat out or with their family but for a single person this feature seems to be really highly regarded. He like the idea of linking automatically to partner restaurants and food delivery services (blue apron ect.) Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): I think the idea works for this target market. I wonder whether a fitness aficionado without such stringent goals would use the application. Interviewee: Jeanna Aydelotte (Revisited)
Triathlete, Crossfit Aficionado October 7th, 2017 Conducted by: Greg Anderson Why we interviewed this person: Axiom fitness has changed significantly since the last time I spoke with Jeanna. I wanted to get her insights on the current wireframes and solution as she fits our persona as an amateur athlete. We really wanted to understand this: Do we offer value in our current form to amateur athletes? Is there any additional items she sees as necessary to exist and maintain users in the current environment? We learned this about the problem space: The solution was received well. She pointed out that many athletes have dietary preferences. We were already considering this but it needs to be called out explicitly that our suggestions will shape to your dietary needs/restrictions. She also loved the idea of a truly dynamic training system but pointed out that it really needs to adjust real time. If you go for an extra-long run it should suggest a few extra calories in your next meal. We were surprised by: At the start of our talk she mentioned that she was a cheapskate and doesn’t pay for any of the premium apps but at the end she said she might even pay for this if it works. Though this is a common revenue stream amongst fitness apps it surprised me that there was some willingness to purchase even after a 45 minute conversation. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): She mentioned social elements. I think we need to put some thought into how we can activate sharing when all the applications that track also offer sharing/group interaction. Interview #9
Henry Phan - Silicon Valley Triathlon Club The first person I interviewed this week was an amateur triathlete who spend his mornings and weekends preparing for various races throughout the year. I wanted to get his insight on how we can best develop the core product to retain users. After going through several features of the app, he was most interested in the real time feedback aspect of the technology. If he made any changes in his planned workouts, the AI takes that into account and immediately tailors the following meals and workouts. This is something no other app currently does and as he points out, the biggest pain point in pre-set fitness plans. In his own words, "Sometimes I feel really and want to do more, sometimes I feel like crap and cut my work out in half. I don't need a plan to tell me where I should stop." I then proceeded to ask if he would be interested in seeing a plan vs actual feature to gauge how he's doing relative to weekly goals set. In our ensuing discussion, we uncovered that the nature of tailored prescribed plans is that they always change based on how well you advance (or not). If we can give users an option to set a weekly plan that changes automatically based on your performances in real time. If someone has been going hard for a few days, or has been taking a few days off, the AI should know how to make adjustments and give reasons why. Weekly may not even make sense if the recommendation changes day by day. He suggested that we consider just doing a "workout on deck", and show how the intensity decreases if you've been not active for a while. And while we don’t necessarily have to show plan vs actual, it would be nice to incorporate improvement metrics somewhere in the app. He later wondered if it even made sense to have specificity in the recommendations. We should probably stay clear of specific distances and metric targets since those can change with each workout. In essence, the value proposition should be how we can give users real time, fact based insight to adapt to on-going fitness and nutritional variables and guide them to their health goals. Why we interviewed this person: We wanted to see how we can take the AI functionality further and make it more user friendly to retain users. We really wanted to understand this: How the technology adapting in real time can make users' lives easier. We learned this about the problem space: People's plans and results change all the time, we need something to motivate them and get back on track. We were surprised by: Planning doesn't actually provide that much value for our app because users will look most of the time to the next work out or meal after feedback on history. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): Our app as a stand alone can already help you improve and go workout to workout and meal to meal with lack of specific goals to just improve and learn how to train/eat efficiently no matter what fitness level you're on. The premium version can allow for importing of fitness plans to allow for plan/actual reporting and AI tailoring. Interview #10 Unnamed - Business Development at Under Armour My second interview was with an employee of Under Armour who worked in business development. She did not wish to be named but was happy to answer some questions I had about strategic partnerships. I first asked about the data sharing issue - if UA would allow data from their apps to go to a third party app. This is something they currently do for a couple apps provided that there's a value proposition back. One is obviously the foot traffic that it generates to UA apps, which then allows UA to build its brand equity and advertise while users are in their app. Considering this specific technology, UA would likely ask for AI insight back into their databased but this is a unique feature to our technology that I was unwilling to give out. The negotiation chips in our favor would be the variety of apps out there that do the same thing - e.g. Runkeeper, Nike, UA, etc. We can also negotiate on revenue sharing based on data used from their source. The second point we discussed was product synergy. UA already provided tracking and analysis, how would our product be complementary vs substitutional? Our core technology, being a real time feedback and advisory engine, provides the inputs that allows users to keep tracking workouts on UA and watching the analytics of their progress. While the dashboards these other tracking apps provide are for explaining what happened, ours seek to diagnose pain points, predict future performance, and prescribe workouts and nutrition. While a few companies in the fitness space also try to give workout plans that stretch out over several weeks. Our technology can complement it to show well you're doing plan vs actual. By her words "If someone had a 6 week plan but hasn't been working very hard, I’m sure they'd want to know how to best catch up while doing it safely and efficiently." Why we interviewed this person: We wanted to know if our potential business partners would work with us. We really wanted to understand this: What the negotiation variables would be and what would be the value proposition be going both ways. We learned this about the problem space: There were many options to consider which should give us more bargaining power. Furthermore there are many synergies and complementing features that we can develop on to benefit users. We were surprised by: Our technology is actually very different from what fitness apps are currently offering because we're not in the business of creating a million different workout plans or tracking software/hardware. Though reporting we can potentially completely take over. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): Selecting business partners is an important step we should be thinking about. Need to figure out which apps give us the most feature synergy and user base while reducing cost. October 7th 2017 - Interview #11
Interviewee: Vincent Hébert (Part 2) Conducted by: Hugo Pelland Why we interviewed this person: Vincent had helped me at the very beginning, when I was still working on the recruitment space. He was very generous with his time and appreciate to share his opinion. Given that he recently ran a half marathon (plus a 5k before, just for fun) I thought he would be a great candidate to share his feedback on the current state of our app. We really wanted to understand this: The goal was to get Vincent's impressions on our current wireframe. We learned this about the problem space: The main thing I learned is that not everyone like to use apps! He is someone who is otherwise relatively tech hungry, but has not done the jump when it comes to fitness tech. His main point actually made a lot of sense: isn't it just a distraction to have to think of an app when it's already hard enough to get to work? Basically, he thinks that having a good routine and general healthy habit is way more important, and difficult to accomplish, than to have an app to help track. It may seem obvious but it was a bit of a surprise... We were surprised by: It was surprised by the fact that Vincent did not see any value in this app, at all. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview) The next day, I had another interview, so I started with a more vague description of the project, instead of jumping into the app. See below... October 8th 2017 - Interview #12 Interviewee: Sam B. Conducted by: Hugo Pelland Why we interviewed this person: Sam used to be an olympic-level swimmer when he was in college and, even though he has retired from competition now, still enjoys staying in good shape. I wanted to know whether tracking his exercise was something he cares about and, if yes, would the app we are working on be useful. We really wanted to understand this: Following the surprising interview with Vincent, I really wanted to know more about the basic value proposition of tracking health & fitness in an app in the first place, while also getting feedback on the wireframe itself. We learned this about the problem space: Here are the observations that Sam provided which can be useful for improving the concept:
We were surprised by: There was not much surprise from this interview. Sam had great feedback regarding certain details but nothing completely surprising. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview) Continue getting more feedback as much as possible before the final submission Interviewer: Gabie Ivanova
Interview Date: 10/8/17 Interviewee: Stephanie Dittemore, Team Leader at Servcorp. Interviewer: Gabie Ivanova
Interview Date: 10/8/17 Interviewee: Brett Kunde, certified personal trainer at Crunch Interview #11
Interviewee: Larry Sun Global Marketing Manager at Adidas October 7, 2017 Conducted by: Jamie Moon Why we interviewed this person: Larry is part of the marketing team at Adidas and wanted to get his feedback on our app prototype We really wanted to understand this: wanted to understand if similar companies like Adidas would be interested in integrating with our app We learned this about the problem space: integrating with different app can’t be done overnight as it requires data security and integration to be successful. We did notice that our app can benefit from the existing data that Adidas has in its app. Adidas has an app that provides recipes for better nutrition, and recommendations for better sleep and habits. Further, these recommendations are designed by health and fitness experts. But they provide weekly goals, not daily goals tailored for individuals. We were surprised by: I was actually relieved to see that Adidas didn’t provide daily goals or daily routines because that would conflict with our core value. Adidas app wasn’t an app that was in my radar to research as we looked into other popular apps such as Strava, fitbit, myfitnesspal, etc. Without interviewing Larry, I wouldn’t have known that Adidas had a fitness app at all. One more competition down. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): I think we are definitely providing a value that’s not currently existing. As our final product launch is near, it’s important for us to finalize our prototype. Interview #12 Interviewee: Scott Dai Senior Manager at EY October 8, 2017 Conducted by: Jamie Moon Why we interviewed this person: I interviewed Scott before and wanted to get his feedback on the prototype we developed. We really wanted to understand this: wanted to understand if our prototype made sense to an ordinary user We learned this about the problem space: Scott really liked the simplicity on the app and the fact that it provided daily recommendation, and it was based on real-time information. He also likes the fact that he can dismiss the recommendation based on how he feels that day and postpone the workout or have the app provide new recommendation. We were surprised by: For someone who’s not pursuing a “bodybuilder” route, he said he wouldn’t pay for the dashboard and/or detailed analysis. Maybe just to see how extensive the analysis is, but he said he would careless. He said it might be helpful to show based on the goal and what you have achieved, the estimate duration left to achieve his/her goal. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): surprisingly, Scott did not really care about trophies that we showed when the user achieved a goal. He said he would rather see list of achievements that he accomplished and how that rank stacked against his friends/connections as to promote competition. Interview #7
Rachel McBride - Supply & Demand Planner at Fitbit This week I talked to an employee at Fitbit who has always been engaged in fitness throughout her life. I showed her the our idea through the wireframing that I accomplished this week to get her feedback. She liked the core idea of a fact based fitness tool that can adapt to varying fitness levels. She also thought it was unique that people have more autonomy over what type of activity and food they want to explore easily within the user interface. However, she felt the Pro version came up a bit short. If people can already use the AI to guide them towards creating a fitness plan, then the value of a BOT/person setting up plans for you seems redundant. Especially because for events like Marathons, there is already enough guidance on the internet and people would probably pay for that type of service. During our discussion, I brought up an idea regarding diagnostic reports, like what they do at ancestry.com. Rachel thought it would be a great idea if we can get the content right. But in terms of core value proposition it made a ton of sense. We already had the data and can provide a lot of value if we wrote some code to analyze the data for our users in depth. The cost of analyzing data and publishing a report would not be very high but could generate a lot of value. We could sell these in depth reports for a lot of money and customers can order them on an as-needed basis. The AI can support the report by answers any questions the customer might have on the report. The billing model would be easier as well, pay per diagnostic. Why we interviewed this person: We wanted to know how people in the fitness industry would feel about the product's value proposition. We really wanted to understand this: How we can develop this product so that it builds a stronger value prop to retain users. We learned this about the problem space: Building custom work out plans didn't quite tap the full potential of the product we're building. There are a lot of companies already doing that. We were surprised by: The amount of insight that can be generated, which is why people are probably interested in using us in the first place. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): I feel like we need to explore the core product more to see how else we can utilize all this data and analytics engine. Interview #8 Brian Ko - Computer Programmer at Lumosity My next interview was with an acquaintance that knows all about gamification. Brian works as a software programmer for Lumosity, an app that improves your brain through games. I showed him the gamification through achievement screens on the wireframe and he took a while to understand it. He told me it was really confusing what the star map was trying to achieve, or even what the relationships between achievements meant. If it was only connected by one achievement to the next then why use constellations? Brian was concerned that most people do not like constellations and that this would be a big turn off for average people not into stars. Furthermore he noticed how the design was not as good as the previous screens and recommended that I remove this feature until something better can take its place. He asked me about the core value proposition and asked why I felt the need to put that in. "People who are interested in fitness and diet will find you because they're being given good/tailored information on what to do, and that’s the feature that will build your user base", said he. He also did not see the relationship between gamification and achievements because there's no game being played, and no aspects of that game is appealing in any way. Bottom line is this - people aren't using our app because they want to play flappy bird, it just doesn't apply. If people want to track their steps and miles, there are a ton of apps that already do it. If we're building a fitness-based AI, you need it to create value through reporting, diagnosing, predicting, and prescribing. Why we interviewed this person: We wanted to know how to apply gamification or achievement systems in our app to retain users. We really wanted to understand this: If there was a way for us to improve our existing star map to make users super engaged. We learned this about the problem space: The investment into the idea does not justify its value and is not what differentiates us from other apps. We were surprised by: That gamification actually doesn't really apply to the product we are trying to build. It may even be a distraction or turn off. Other interesting outcomes or learning (how this interview might change your next interview): We need to think about supporting features that complement the strengths of the technology instead of adding bells and whistles trying to be like other apps. |
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October 2017
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