Hypothesis:

We believe students need a platform specifically for buying and selling used items for their personal and academic lives through online and pop-up stores on campus. By providing a platform to buy and sell their used things, we can help promote sustainability, start up freshman's university life, and build connections between students.

Background Information:

Our group has relied heavily on theories from Bland and Luch, and we applied these concepts to our project to verify our hypothesis and understand our targeted group in a greater scope.

Personas served as a communication bridge between potential customers and product developers by creating a common understanding of users' needs and hypotheses that are testable for later experiments. The early personas help to make a mindset for us as designers to generate ideas aligned with the benefits of targeted audiences. Moreover, prioritizing certain personas can further increase our group's confidence level, as we can acknowledge which group of customers could be excluded and identify the large pool of potential customers.

Storyboards can provide us with a visualization of a user's scenario and can transform facts and experiences into shared values and assumptions. It also prevents us from self-referencing, assuming users' problems based on our own experiences or issues.

Value accelerators are the values of our services and could help us extract values from the market, which refers to the pool of ideas we generated in the beginning stage. We need to select the best ideas from the pool. We can prioritize the ideas that provide the greatest value by evaluating their value to the business and the level of risk. Certainly, the ideal would be high value with the least risk. By leveraging and integrating the top value accelerators into our business strategy, we could gain a competitive advantage relative to our rivalries.

Key Assumptions

Our key assumptions have largely gone unchanged from the previous GLS; however, we have gathered more data about our consumers, created personas, and stories which all have guided us toward new Key Assumptions.

• Customers want a platform that has ads embedded within the system rather than a monthly subscription system.
• The Ad revenue we generate through the platform will not decrease over time.
• The profile verification system we use within our system will effectively verify all users on the platform to create a safe environment.
• Customers see an increasing need for such a platform with the increasing inflation and associated rise in the costs of school materials.
• The system helps contribute positively to reducing climate change by causing less waste to accumulate (i.e., fewer unused textbooks taking up space while students buy new ones every year).
• Our main customer segment is composed of university students.
• Textbooks will be the most sought-after product, while we will focus on hosting a wide range of products, we will primarily focus on the promotion of textbooks.
• The product verification system will be seamlessly implemented into our application and will ensure the products being bought and sold through our system are true products to avoid any possible scams
• The messages we will use to communicate our product will be effectively formulated to entice potential customers to use our service
• Using a data collection method such as Delphi/Surveys we will be able to effectively collect enough data to use the forecasting method Naive Forecast 1 (NF1) to forecast the number of students on university campuses who would use our service

Task: Explain the strengths and weaknesses of your results from these applications tests. ( what we have and WHAT WE DONT HAVE to further solidify the information we know)