4A – Forming An Opportunity Belief

A common issue I witness that goes continuously unaddressed is the idea that technology is “scary”. What I mean by this the common idea that even in the generation where technology has become universal commonplace in everyday life; not too many people understand why things work they way they do and lack the proper understanding in making purchases that properly suit their needs. I mentioned this briefly in my previous blog post, where technology is changing so rapidly that many people don't know the difference between their options to the point in which the average consumer is being taken advantage of. Even though there are over thousands of resources that can assist people in making such purchases many people either don’t know about them or they’ve visited them before but got intimidated by the jargon many of the community members have adopted. My goal is to make a three-part tech forum, with the three parts being part social media, part news outlet, and part wiki page. The idea is to create a place where people can talk about the tech that interests them while also hosting links to the products( ie where to purchase it, or in-depth look at the components) and ability to research a certain feature and a way to compare features (with both comment based reviews and unbiased reviews). The structure will be similar to Reddit where users can make threads about the products they are using or comment about current tech news but without the “upvote” system. This way users can express their honest opinions about something and don't feel pressured to parakeet popular opinions. While also allowing users to search the meaning of various terms they may come across. How this will work is that for every piece of tech there will be a tag associated with it allowing users to search a certain product and the search results will include news articles about said product, user-created threads about the product and a list of features with both articles and threads on the features in question. The target demographic would both the informed and the uninformed. To gauge interest for such a site I interviewed various people with various understanding and asked both direct and indirect questions to full gauge their understanding. For the direct questions I asked the interviewed person how much they feel they understand about technology, where do they go when something stops working and where do they go before they make a tech purchase. Then for the indirect question, I would ask them questions about their phones and how much they know about their phones; asking questions like what type of phone do they use, what do they use their phone for, what features do they use their phone for, what carrier do they use and what is included in their current plan, and if they know the features of other phones on the market. When interviewing my prototypical consumers, of the 3 people I had interviewed 2 of them had an android based product( S9+ and “Moto”) devices and the other had an iPhone (iPhone 6 plus). Note these interviews are not a representation of consumer base of said products, with that being said for the rest of the blog the interviewers will be differentiated by their phone of choice to protect their identity. When asked how much they know about technology as a whole on a scale of 10, the S9+ user rated themselves as an 8/10 as they felt comfortable with most things tech-based but becomes unsure of things when objects got technical such in-depth description of various hardware aspects. The next being the “Moto” user whereas they rated themselves as 6/10, to which they explained they keep up with the news of various tech updates and keeps up with the stock of tech companies but when it comes to operating such products they become bewildered without the assistance of a manual or the internet. Finally was the iPhone 6 plus user to whom felt rather uncomfortable around new technology and rated themselves as a 3/10 and felt they could only use technology with the assistance of others. As expected all participants universally explained how the internet was essential to their understanding as they all admitted to using google searches to uncover the information on technology and admitted that their research would be limited to the first page of google and a couple user views. When asked if they knew the name of the site they used they all responded with “ whatever, Google had presented to them” and when asked if they had visited sites like “Tom’s hardware” the response was unanimous with a “probably”. The responses were the same when it came to their process of buying tech as they said most of their information on the product would be based both the purchase site and “Google”. When asked what phone each person used frequently they all had smartphones and knew generally what their device was capable of expect for the Moto user to whom didn’t know what exactly what model phone they had but explained they only used their phone for calls and text. For the S9+ and iPhone 6 plus users why both explained that call/text was important but preferred a phone great playback quality and video quality. When asked about their service both the Moto and iPhone user where on prepaid plans with about 6~8 GBS of high-speed data and had felt comfortable with their phone carrier because it was affordable and they were able to cancel at any time. Finally, when asked about the other phones on the market they gave the same response as they did before when asked how they did do research when it comes to tech products as they knew vaguely about the other popular products on the market and most of their information came from Google. When asked about the popular phone brands overseas (ie OnePlus, Poco, and Xiaomi) they answered homologously, with no knowledge of what made these phones desirable overseas and what made many popular American phones undesirable. Now after completing the interview process, I still feel my service is a necessity as even though I had interviewed only 3 people I feel the general consensus we get most of our tech information from Google which is a search engine and lacked the knowledge of trusted sites or reviewers to whom they could gather their information from. I am not saying Google is a bad resource to find information but it limits the knowledge of the user. In this day and age, people should have a greater understanding of what is in their hands and what it is capable of and what their options are. With this site, I want to a universal platform to where users can find both trusted articles and reviews while also being able to vocalize their own point of view and perspective on the current state of technology.