Helping people find new experiences they wouldn't otherwise know about is a value location-based apps often try to provide. But do people often want to do so? As it turns out, one app, Roamz, actually wasn't being used that way.
What Roamz creators found, instead, was that users knew what they wanted and were just looking for some guidance and some idea of what other people like. So Roamz is "pivoting" its approach. Instead of emphasizing discovery of "new" experiences, Roamz tries to provide guidance about experiences or products about which a given user already has a use case.
In other words, it turns out that when people leave the house in the morning, they aren't terribly interested in exploring the world around them. They have to get to work. As it turns out, "serendipity" apps and features aren't terribly useful at times when people are engaged in purposeful activities.
It reminds us of how bold Steve Jobs really was, designing products we didn't know we needed. It's very risky to do so.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
It's Hard to Figure Out What People Want
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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