Thanks for the very useful feedback. To answer your questions:
For the vaccine example, I agree that would be a huge problem and probably make it totally unworkable. Your hint is right on. For my real example, the “rules” wouldn’t change much at all, or only very slowly (on the timescale of months or more likely years).
The customer is any individual with disposable income. There is not a way to use Google or Excel to solve this problem. As for how many there are, it’s either something that would never take off and fizzle out and die, or it could become a service that millions of people find invaluable. Hard to predict in more detail than that.
Nobody spends income just to spend it, they only do it for some combination of:
To get something they need to stay alive
To save time and/or energy on a task they do often
To get something that makes them happy (eg entertainment, nicer versions of things from category 1, etc.)
Hint: apps are never #1, so are you saving people time on something they are already doing, or are you giving them something new that makes them happy?
In either case, you need to decide what kind of person would be interested (eg people who care about getting vaccinated as soon as possible), and where they fall on the
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ ranking.
That will inform the level of polish your app would need. And if there are enough people who would want it.
All great points. I’ve read the article you mentioned, and it will be a crucial guiding principle in how I would want to design this—maybe the most crucial.
Thanks for the very useful feedback. To answer your questions:
For the vaccine example, I agree that would be a huge problem and probably make it totally unworkable. Your hint is right on. For my real example, the “rules” wouldn’t change much at all, or only very slowly (on the timescale of months or more likely years).
The customer is any individual with disposable income. There is not a way to use Google or Excel to solve this problem. As for how many there are, it’s either something that would never take off and fizzle out and die, or it could become a service that millions of people find invaluable. Hard to predict in more detail than that.
Nobody spends income just to spend it, they only do it for some combination of:
To get something they need to stay alive
To save time and/or energy on a task they do often
To get something that makes them happy (eg entertainment, nicer versions of things from category 1, etc.)
Hint: apps are never #1, so are you saving people time on something they are already doing, or are you giving them something new that makes them happy?
In either case, you need to decide what kind of person would be interested (eg people who care about getting vaccinated as soon as possible), and where they fall on the https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ ranking. That will inform the level of polish your app would need. And if there are enough people who would want it.
All great points. I’ve read the article you mentioned, and it will be a crucial guiding principle in how I would want to design this—maybe the most crucial.