In my spare time I’ve explored issue after issue, event after event for the sake of knowing what is unfolding on the planet I live. I have yet to ever find a problem I have cared more about than one that affects me personally, and I’m sure this sentiment is shared by many. Human interest rarely carries a far distance outside of its own scope. While I personally intend to solve any and all problems that will inevitably introduce themselves to me, starting close to home seems to be the easiest and most effective way in finding a problem that kindles the fire in myself necessary to extract my full ability in finding resolution. For this reason, I want to help people with my same weakness: overthinking overshadowing the ability to make trivial decisions, concerned about the effect it would have on their macro-status. I want to make an app not only to help these over-analyzers, but cater to them.
My other main interests — the current state of the marine environment and an idea to help tech consumers understand more about the information about them being used and currently available online, complete with an idea for a machine-learning algorithm to summarize and paraphrase TOS documents — seem worth pursuing and I plan on re-examining them in the future. However, being able to cater to a demographic in an already over-connected society in order to help them make decisions to focus on what matters most in their lives — what they do in the real world — has more impact considering our fast-paced society filled with overwhelming quantities of pure information. Furthermore, I plan on using the online tools people are already using to augment my app, connecting to platforms such as Google, Facebook, Yelp!, and many more to provide dynamic information and solutions to their daily grind. This led me to consider using a PEST analysis to gauge the market based on the political, environmental, social and technological factors and estimate if this would be an optimal time for a product like Flowr to make it’s debut.
This app at its core would be politically neutral. There’s nothing polarizing about it, and it’s catering to a demographic with nothing to do with politics. It poses no threat to the environment, and there’s a possibility for added features that remind the user to be environmentally conscious after certain activities, such as getting take-out food or coffee. Societally, there’s an insatiable appetite for being connected and the average user of this app would be someone who is connected, but wants to streamline their day and their events in an efficient way that breaks down the decision making process to focus on what matters, real connections.
As a technology, social media has been done time after time. This idea, however, pushes a step further past the likes of Facebook and Google events/calendar. Through the decision process the user is forced to extract their true opinions and wants, and from that are given options rather than having to find a place based on their specifications and retroactively make an event. The user of my app should be able to meet up with a friend, decide what they collectively want to do, be given options, auto-create events in something such as Google or Facebook, and allow others to join if they so wish. This puts Flowr in an interesting place among other products designed to perform similar functions. There are planners, but very few every actually help you with your decision process, if any.
Flowr connects people in the real world, rather than pushing everyone involved further into the app. Therefore, I believe it’s on par with Facebook in that respect, with the ability to make events and invite people. It’s comfortably above Google Calendar, having it’s functionality but with more information available in the app itself to base events being planned on, as well as being a much cleaner process to get you to the end goal. Through my own assessment, Google allows you to search their platform, then add it to your calendar. However, it doesn’t take into account what you currently want, it just gets your general data points and spits a bunch of options at you, sometimes leaving you even more confused than you started off as. However, I quickly realized that my opinion only means so much against tech giants like Google and Facebook.
To get a better gauge of Flowr, I decided that I needed some unbiased sources to provide feedback. To get that, I had to ask questions that would draw a real answer out from people, something that pulled their frustrations to the forefront. After I got past the “screening” questions, I started with something decisively hard-to-answer to get my interviewee’s gears turning:
“How do you make a decision?”
I could usually judge based on their reactions. The ones I was looking for were the ones that either typically couldn’t answer at first, or said something vague akin to “Google” or “Just look around”. I want the people that my app can help make this process much more informed and structured for, leaving them feeling better about the choices they make. So I would continue with, “How long does this usually take?” and from that I could start getting an estimate of the time the “user journey” in my app would need to beat. Furthering on, I asked more meticulous questions to investigate what parts of the apps the users were interested in the most. My usual few were:
“Do you usually eat with friends or alone?”
“What’s the most important part of making your final decision when trying something new?”
“How do you typically invite friends to outings?”
After asking all my questions along with whatever specific ones I could think of and receiving feedback, I would usually end with an extremely important question:
“Do you know someone that would benefit from help making decisions?”
As it turns out, almost everyone knows at least one person that really struggles with making decisions no matter the size. The (typically) positive feedback was not expected in the slightest, but I’m elated to know that I’m very much not alone in my struggle to make trivial choices and that my app would have some hope of supporting this demographic, most of all me.
However, there’s one more crucial thing that at first I completely missed: there’s gold in conversation. After talking with one particular volunteer who happened to be an Australian tourist, he told me about what he focuses on when deciding what to do during a vacation. To my complete surprise, he said that he cares about the food the most, enjoying the local cuisine in all manners during his various expeditions. This threw me off guard, as I assumed tourists were pretty cut and paste: See the sights, fill their schedules with activities or wander aimlessly, and exit through the gift shop. From this I realized something that will be very important if I intend Flowr to learn and “grow” with the user: priorities. The first step in knowing a user is knowing what they prioritize, what they’re really focused on even among the clutter of less important decisions.
I’ve gone from helping users make decisions to helping them structure their time subjectively better overall as well. The most exciting takeaway for me is that I now know that conversation can be just as useful as the usual interview flow. In the future I plan on combining the two to get volunteers into their own tangents and scraping their brains to find what bothers them the most, and what they want more of. Overall, the user interviews were highly successful and I will continue them for each step of the streamlining process in my product stages.
Currently, some products like Evernote that are made to help one organize can become obsessed with categorization, helping people to segment their occasions and reduce schedule conflict. Others such as Google Calendar don’t rely on tags, but eventually devolve into making plans with no specifics in mind and little interaction. However, neither help people in the process of creating these events, while also building more time a user needs to correctly place their event, consequentially leading to it feeling tedious to make events for the smaller or more commonplace occasions. My vision is for a user to be able to have a thought, which leads to a want, which pushes them to open my app and get started on planning the what and where, while also creating the when and who. This information would be saved for future use and prediction of user habits to continually give better suggestions for a faster process. So, as other apps demand more maintenance from users, Flowr will continue to get faster and eventually flourish into an essential app for people with places to go and things to see, but don’t want to keep needing “just a few more minutes” deciding.
User Journeys:
“I’m Lauren, I am a 21 year old college student. All my life I have struggled to make decisions, from the small things like what coffee I want to order, to big life decisions like which city I’m going to live in. I’ve tried coin flipping, writing pro/con lists, and absolutely everything else that I thought would make the process easier. Realistically though, everyone makes a decision with the same goal in mind, and that’s the best possible (most logical) outcome. When I started using flowr the process was broken down into smaller decisions instead of one very intimidating decision. Using flowr has trained me to think this way, and using this app has improved my overall decision making ability.”
“Hi my name is Arvin and all my life I have acted impulsively. Acting based on my gut feelings and intuition has turned out really good at times, and not so good others. I have always wanted to start putting more thought into the decisions that I make, but I’ve never known where to start. I downloaded the flowr app and now when I want to make a decision I’m forced to consider the different factors involved before I act on instinct. Flowr allows me to take a pause before I choose, and being able to SEE my decisions before I make them has made all aspects of my life easier.”
Wireframes for Flowr:
Final page to be added.