Assumptions & Experiments
Assumption 1: Busy people will regularly use our product and respond to friends’ invitations on time.
People Recruited
People we recruited: n=3. We recruited these three people because they were all very busy and upcoming/already graduating students.
- Graduating undergraduate senior studying CS (7.5/10 busy)
- Graduated coterminal student, but still living on campus and about to leave (10/10 busy)
- Graduating PhD econ student (8.5/10 busy)
Detailed Experimental Procedure:
- Recruit participants through word of mouth
- Since our app is designed for college students, we can rely on our personal networks to recruit participants.
- Screen participants for how busy they are, by asking only recruiting participants who self-identify as “busy”
- “On a scale from 1-10, how busy were you yesterday and today?”
- If the prospective participant gives an answer <5, find another participant.
- If the answer is >5, proceed with the rest of the experiment.
- Interview the participants, asking for past behavioral data.
- “Can you pull up conversations with the last 10 people who texted you?”
- For each conversation: “Who initiated the conversation?” “How long did it take for you to respond, if at all?”
- Assess their answers based on how long it took for them to respond to each of the 10 people.
Assumption 2: People are comfortable with rejecting invitations and getting rejections.
People Recruited
Same people from previous experiment. The three participants were appropriate for also testing our second assumption because they all had recent experiences receiving invites from friends to events, and sending invites themselves to friends.
Detailed Experimental Procedure
- Note: We want to avoid any mass invitation sorts of events, like “I invited the senior grade to the senior night” but “I invited friends to come with me to senior night” is fine
- When was the last time you were invited to an event?
- Did you accept it?
- How did you reject it? Do you have text screenshots?
- If you rejected it, how did you feel?
- Do you think that person would invite you less, more, or just the same in the future?
- Since you couldn’t make it, would you rather have been invited and gone through this rejection process or just not been invited at all?
- Let’s play would you rather – would you rather be invited to everything on earth and never be able to go with friends to them, or always be available but go alone to things?
- When was the last time you invited someone else to an event?
- Did they accept it? (hopefully)
- If they rejected it, how did you feel?
- How did they reject it?
- Would you invite the same person less, more or just the same in the future?
- Since they couldn’t make it, would you rather have done what you did – invited them and gone through this rejection process – or just not invite them at all?
- Let’s play would you rather – would you rather invite a ton of people to do something with you and all of them reject you (in a polite and friendly way ofc), or do it all alone?
For more information…
- See our detailed experimental designs.
- See our interview artifacts – specifically interview notes – for participants A, B, and C.
