Since we launched our pitch, we have seen a major process of our digital artefact which has stemmed from us focusing on curating content instead of trying to create it all on our own. The biggest lesson I have learnt from the prototyping stage is that your product should essentially be created by your audience. This is achieved through consistently producing samples and ideas of your product where the audience has input in the product development stages, so when it is finally released the audience feels they have been a part of it and it’s something they need not want.
The product becomes personal because we have taken on-board what are consumers have suggested → our recipes haven’t been made by incorrect assumptions of what we think everyone will like.
For example: We received direct messages from a couple of followers who suggested ingredients that we should include in our upcoming videos.
As you can see the following week we posted a cooking video, including the ingredients in which they suggested.
Seeing as our consumers are a main focus it’s really important that we use their feedback to our advantage because we are creating a product for them, we are trying to meet their needs the best we can. So we decided to shift our Instagram account from personal to business which allowed us to gain data and analyse of our account statistics e.g. seeing how many people visited our site each week. Through this change, we were able to notice a dramatic increase in followers as a result of our increased activity.
If it wasn’t for our audience feedback, we wouldn’t have known that we were not attracting enough attention on Facebook or Twitter this was due to the fact that the majority of our audience use Instagram as their main social media platform. Although, this was a bit of a set back as we were going to use these platforms for the business side of our project- posting giveaways and links to websites we thought would be helpful, as we wanted to write lengthier posts in regards to healthy eating – Instagram wouldn’t allow us to do this as they have a word restriction.
But after reading the “copyright, ethics and fair trade article” it gave us an idea of how we could condense all this information we wanted to share on one platform. Seeing as there is no one stopping us from taking ideas off the internet and making it our own it taught us that we can do all this research and take snippets of information from different platforms and use it for our own.
For example, we have used the information on Reddit which has provided us with a scientific background on the nutritional value of foods and used this for our short 2-minute cooking videos.
This has been really helpful for us in the following weeks when we pick out ingredients for our next video.
By attaching the link to the website under our captions on each post it allows for the audience to read more about it if they feel like it. As mentioned before we were originally going to use facebook to post more detailed description but now we can make all this information available on one platform- this has saved us so much time!
By doing this it shows that we are reliable and are cooking truly healthy meals for our audience. The audience doesn’t have to spend hours doing research themselves, it’s all there with a click of a button.
Paper Prototyping
We drew up several different logos to see which one our audience liked better, taking on-board any ideas they had. We did this after watching the making paper prototypes which has saved us a lot of time, instead of spending hours on Photoshop trying to perfect one image. The video also highlighted how people were more likely to give constructive feedback on rough sketches/ drawings because it doesn’t look like you have taken a lot of time doing it. As I mentioned before, if we are constantly taking on board our customers suggestions the product feels more and more personal as we are adapting to their needs through making slight changes.
Breaking
We haven’t really encountered any major hiccups that we’ve drastically needed to change so far, but the ‘breaking’ lecture has taught us to learn from any accidents or mistakes we make. It has taught us that failing gives us an opportunity to learn and even opens us up to new ideas which we may not have thought of- be resilient to change. For future improvement, we aim to create easy snack recipes and more simple 5 ingredient dishes. This will hopefully see an increased engagement with the viewers, as we have noticed our audience is restricted for time in a Uni environment. We also aim to do ‘life hacks’ and to further increase our activity online.
Remaking
I think the biggest thing I have learnt from module 2 is to USE the internet and pretty much extract information from different platforms/ website and make it your own. This is where the concept of F.I.S.T comes back in as we are creating a product using the tools/ information already posted online for us. The success of our digital artefact lies in fact that we now understand that people already think a certain way about something so they will reject a product that is something they can’t relate to, which is why we are using the information that is already online to create a perfect product. Once we gain a bigger audience then we can start slipping in our own original ideas, and over time it will become our own business. I think we are finding it much easier to produce content for our DA now, knowing that we can use other people’s ideas and change them to suit our audience needs.
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