- You. I first began following a vegetarian diet in 2006 and went vegan in January of this year. Having dealt with the difficulties of trying to find animal-free products at the grocery store for nearly half my life, I know the potential of this app and I know how to cater to the target market it will serve. I have a knack for understanding people. Maybe it's from studying psychology or maybe it's because I just love to conversate, but I'm good at getting people to open up to me. Because of this, I've become a great listener. Pairing these skills with my personal experience, I know this app is needed and its demand will keep growing as does the amount of people that forgo animal products.
- What are you offering to customers? The animal-free food market has exploded in the past decade. 10 year ago, you were lucky to find a small selection of Morning Star products in the frozen food aisle at Walmart. Now, it seems a new product is being introduced every week at Publix. This is wonderful progress, but it's not happening fast enough. At least, not evenly throughout the country, so you're left to check the ingredients of each product as you go. Because of this, grocery shopping trips take longer, especially when you're a new vegetarian or vegan. This mobile app will streamline your grocery shopping experience and cut down the time it takes to get in and out of the store while also exposing you to a great variety of products you never knew were accidentally vegan. The app works by using your camera to scan the product's bar code and comparing it to the continuously updated database of products and their ingredients to quickly tell you if the product is safe to consume. To build a large database of products, a team of employees will be dedicated to investigating manufacturers' ingredient sources and compiling already available information from around the internet into one easy to find place. To stay up to date on new products, we will prioritize making connections with manufacturers so as to be informed of new product launches ahead of time that are vegan. To cover as many products as we can, there will also be a feature for users to post about new products they find in their local grocery store and if it contains ambiguous sourced ingredients, it will be put into a queue for the team of employees contact the manufacturer for a verified answer. To cover products that are not yet verified, once the product's bar code is scanned, the app will include information on which ingredients are definitely vegan and which ingredients have ambiguous sources.This way, more products can be included in the database and will allow the shopper to make a personal decision on if that product fits within the boundaries of what they deem acceptable to consume.The app will also feature a listacle section that will share vegan related news, like new product announcements and product sales.
- Who are you offering it to? This product is for people that follow a vegan or vegetarian diet and are finding it either difficult to shop for suitable food products or are wanting to expand their food options outside of what they are used to purchasing. As young adults only make up about half of the vegan population (but most people report going vegan in their 20s), the target market will be people following a meat-free diet between the ages of 18-50. This age group was also chosen because the likelihood of this portion of the population owning a smartphone is incredibly high.
- Why do they care? Being vegan doesn't mean you give up your taste buds. These people care because food is an integral part of American society. Almost everyone wants to eat food they enjoy and they want a variety to choose from. Being stuck to the still-too-small section of vegan foods at your local grocery store gets old fast. This app will allow them to go beyond the certified vegan label to try other foods, possibly old favorites, that they never knew they could have because the ingredient list is too complicated. The listacle aspect of this mobile app will also bring awareness to new brands and products that they can try. They'll also save time and almost everyone is down for that.
- What are your core competencies? The biggest thing the competition lacks is ease of access. Other websites or apps that offer this service are glitchy, too complicated for the average person to comfortably use, and are outdated. This app will be the opposite. First and foremost, we will be focused on making our interface as user friendly as possible. The app will be designed for ease of use with a simplistic look and feel so as to not confuse users with unnecessary clutter. For the free version, the ads will not be intrusive and will be incorporated in a seamless manner. There won't be any ads that take you away to a scam site when you try to close out of them or ads that take over the entire screen rendering your phone useless for fifteen seconds. We will also focus on keeping our app continuously updated so that new products are being added every day to make our database extensive. The integrated listacle feature will also set this app apart from the rest because it will be a unique hub for vegan news and product information. To keep the app easy to use, the different features will be clearly separated and can be accessed by different tabs or a drop down menu.
I think all of these elements work together to create a focused plan that has the prototypical consumer in mind during every step. My personal experience is what sparked this idea and fuels my desire to make a product that is unlike any currently on the market. I want to create a mobile app that will have people excited about trying a vegan diet and will rid them of feeling overwhelmed at the grocery store. I believe in this app's potential. I want it to happen someday.
There were two main points that I took away from the feedback: how will the app be updated and how will the app be user friendly? To address the first point, this app doesn't have so much to do with a specific grocery store as it does the individual product and their manufacturer. While established relationships with major grocery stores would be necessary to gain more elusive information about the ingredients used in a store's private labeled products, the majority of the effort would be focused on obtaining information on as many products and brands as possible. While the app can not be perfect and hold the information of every single product available in the world, we can focus on what's offered within the U.S. first. I think there are three feasible ways to accomplish this: collect already verified information that is available online, have a small team dedicated to contacting manufacturers directly to gain harder to find information, and to create a feature where users can contribute information on new products or products not yet entered in the app's database. The last part would also require the team of employees to fact check the information by using the other two ways listed. To reflect this feedback, I incorporated some more information on what I am offering the customers.
To address the second point, to make the app more user friendly, the interface would have a clean and simplistic design so as to not be confusing to the average user. I would want it to be easy and quick to navigate through the various features, so I would incorporate tabs or a drop down menu to separate the features. The app would go through an evaluation and testing phase where a beta would be released for innovators to try out and offer their feedback on how to further simplify the design. To reflect this feedback, I elaborated on the core competencies.
No comments:
Post a Comment