After analyzing the numerous issues that presented our protagonist during his morning, my team decided to address the question “What could be made to help make paying for gas easier?” To begin creating a proper strategy for developing a product to best address this question, we defined our business goal which is to develop a product that both encourages new users to implement into their daily lives and creates a channel of communication from the gas companies to our company to the user. To go on to address our goals for our users, we first developed three user profiles to represent the diverse backgrounds of possible users that our product will be targeting-since almost anyone past the age of 16 operates a gas vehicle in today’s market. Another aspect that we considered beyond basic demographics and financial capacity is technical proficiency, which will be necessary to use the app that we are looking to develop. Looking at the diverse backgrounds revealed that most users would have a similar goal when using our product-which would be to get gas easily and for cheap. We would have to adapt our product to be comprehensive to people of all technology proficiencies in order to reach the most ideal market and make it a free-to-use product that is still lucrative to our business.
From there, our team began to narrow our scope for what features we want our product to have. Right now we understand that these features are subject to change as we grow more and more specific, but we determined that we would want three basic functions to begin which are to feature user accounts, an online payment function, and information regarding pricing for gas prices. As we continue to work through a possible Structure for the app, we are understanding that most of the features that we will need will be to make these three main categories of features function-such as shopping carts, databases for user information, account customization, and more which will be defined in greater detail as we further building our skeleton of the app. As our conversations indicate right now, we are hoping to create a system that automatically scans a license plate and charges the user whatever amount their gas is. This way the user will be able to simply pull up to the pump and begin fueling without the need to use a card. We are addressing the possible security issues right now, and are leaning towards registering a permission setting so the user can confirm each payment through the app. One of the greatest obstacles that our team is facing when planning for features is how to best address the need to make an app user-friendly for someone who is not technically proficient. Some ideas proposed suggest perhaps creating a feature outside of the app where the user could register their vehicle for automatic payments inside our participating gas stations. Other ideas proposed involve automatic billing and other paper systems. So far our team has been doing very well at collaborating as we all work to noodle through this new process for thinking, and I am very excited to see where this project goes!