# FY1 S2 W2 Study

# FY1 S2 W1 Needfinding Interviews

### **From the first round of needfinding interviews**

Interviewed 5 people: 

- 3 are friends from college, 2 are friends from work.
- All are between 25 and 35 years old.
- 4 are males. 1 is female.
- 3 are living with romantic partners. 2 are living with housemates.
- All cook, drive.
- 3 are in the software industry.

Notes from the interviews: 

- Plans meals in advance (upto a week).
- Plans meals as social events. Weakly desires to manage contacts to invite to the social events.
- Records recipes. To recreate success.
- Tracks nutrition intake by measuring weight of food items in each meal. Breaks it down to carb, fat, protein. Pays subscription fee for nutrition tracking app.
- Tracks exercises as plain texts in the Apple notes app on iPhone. Titles are dates. Records weights lifted, repetitions per set, number of sets.
- Manually looks up notes. Weakly desires to see trends across notes.
- Weakly desires to get notifications to reach out to contacts. Weakly positively responds to the idea of getting notes about contacts.
- Desires to get assistance of shopping journey. For example, wanted to purchase a dutch oven recently. Spent multiple days browsing for products since it is an expensive item to buy. Wants to keep track of products discovered so far, discarded, top candidates. Automatically fill in information about multiple products.
- Writes notes by texting messages to self on messenger.
- Records inspirations for recipes, music composition.
- Writes temporary notes for tasks and events to add to a calendar later.
- Does not record any data at all. Considers privacy to be important and fears trackers. Uses Firefox Focus browser for added privacy.

Reflection

- I still think there is a lot of utility we can provide by focusing on private (personal) data as opposed to just public web data.
- People fear the effort of adding information to the app. Once the data is added, it is easy to imagine GPT assistants delivering great utility using the data. But the effort of adding data is great. Typing is burdensome. Even speaking to the phone is extra work that is otherwise not necessary.
- I sense low demand for personal notebook. One person suspected during interview that not many people take notes in the first place. All showed interests, but I think out of politeness. None showed strong reactions to the idea.