Initially, our target audience was intended for elementary students where teachers can first introduce the website to their students and it could be a fun field trip moment or a family bonding. However, after talking to our peers and discussing how feasible this could be considering our limited time and knowledge with local elementary students, my partner, Laura Yien, and I decided to pivot our target audience to be incoming UC Davis students (or thinking on going here) or first-year UC Davis students.
Laura and I interviewed 4 people that fit our new target audience. We interviewed three UC Davis Freshmen which are Edyn, Claire and Jenna and Franki who is a DePaul university student and have thought about coming to Davis. Because one of our interactive web app's main goal is to introduce our target audience to new and exciting places of Downtown Davis and help them learn and explore more about it, we decided to interview current UC Davis freshman as they are still extensively new but have quite the knowledge around navigating through Davis. By interviewing them, we can examine what new people first learn about Davis or Downtown Davis when they first came here. As for interviewing Franki, it helped us because they're still unfamiliar with Davis and we want to understand how we can make our web app more fun and interactive so that once they start learning about Davis, they can see learn and navigate through Davis in a cool and entertaining way.
We learned from our interviews that they were typically introduced around Downtown Davis because of Orientation but even with that, there wasn't much time spent to explore downtown. Davis seems to be quite popular because of cows, eggheads, and a fun and chill college town. Franki also noted that Davis "looked kinda funky". Besides knowing Downtown due to orientation, most of our freshman interviewes mentioned that they also slowly navigate around it due to friends and all the cool restaurants or boba places they try out. When asked about Davis history, they noted that they don't really know anything about it but it would be really cool to learn the story behind the popular establishments. Franki also noted that the surrounding town was super important when deciding for what college to commit to.
Based on the interviews we conducted, we can tailor our web app to introduce more of the history behind Davis' popular establishments or scenes and how they come into play. We also learned that prospective and/or new UC Davis students have limited knowledge about Davis so we aim for our web app to introduce more cool places with historical value that contribute back to the seal.