Sunday, February 7, 2016

Interviewing customers No. 2

As much as my idea really sounded perfect for the Gainesville area, with it's already existing vegan restaurants, I don't know if my original idea was all that unique. After interviewing 5 customers last week, everyone sounded interested in the idea, but unsure of if it was suitable for them. With so many other existing places similar to this, I feel like the idea would need much more of a confident backing than what I received.
I definitely think I talked to the right customers, I believe my target audience in opening this bake shop would be college students. I just don't know if enough college students have the dietary restrictions that my bakery would focus on, thus enough people to keep the business going. The only other people I would like to interview would be more people with those dietary restrictions I named, I only had one person with an existing restriction in my original interviews, and two people with friends with such restrictions, so I would like to take to more people with these specific diets.
My new questions would be:
1) What dietary restrictions do you have?
2) How difficult are they to follow? What kind of difficulties, if any, have the made in your life?
3) Would you be interested in a bakery that had more foods that you could eat?
4) What kind of foods would you be interested in seeing/
5) Do you think other people besides yourself, without such dietary restrictions, would be interested in this kind of bakery?
At the end of my first post, I talked about how I found that my idea would overall be more or a less a failure. It doesn't seem to have a unique enough spin on it to keep customers coming, or to grab new customers' attention at all.
I don't mind asking people to answer questions, that wasn't the difficult part of this assignment, at least for me. I thought the difficult part of this was getting people to approve of me filming them, I felt that I could have gotten more people to agree to let me interview them if it wasn't being recorded, people could be very warm and comfortable talking to me, but became very self-conscious and uncomfortable as soon as I started recording.
My Three Tips:
1) Be warm and understanding; make them feel comfortable with you as though you've known them your whole life.
2) Be genuinely interested in what they're saying and don't feel confined or restricted by the questions you may have pre-prepared, if they say something that sounds interesting, ask them about it, don't just move on to your next question; there could have been something interesting that you didn't think of that they could have had to say!
3) Be polite! Say "thank you" and "hi" and ask them about themselves! People love to talk about themselves, and the more you let them tell you a little background on them, the more comfortable they'll be with you and the more you'll get a better interview! And not only that, but something they mention in some background information could help you determine better questions to ask , etc.
Here are my interviews.

2 comments:

  1. Good post Maxine. Your interviews were very informative and to the point. The pointers you gave were also really good. I totally forgot to do my interviews this week but will use those tips for my next round of interviews. Your questions were very straight forward while also being open ended enough to get good answers. Overall well done.

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  2. Cool business idea, I personally don't know of any bakeries in Gainesville myself. I really agree with your tips for interviewing people. It's the simple things that can really make the difference in the responses of the person you're interviewing. I hope to see a bakeries like this around some day.

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