2D – Streamline Realty
Notes:
Background: Our product relies on the assumption that students in our target market (college students looking for off-campus housing in a competitive housing market for the following year) will be interested in the educational content of the housing hunting process, as we plan to emphasize the educational component in our product to attract students.
Testing Method & Rationale: Ultimately, we want to see if students would be interested in the educational component of our product if recommended by their peers. To replicate this situation, we (as a recommender) can send an existing video about the housing hunting process to a sample of students and see if they would be willing to spend their time watching the video. If they do, that displays their interest in learning more about the content of the housing hunting process.
Reason for the “Twist”: Students will often lie about whether they watched a certain video/content or not, especially on text. Therefore, by adding this twist (where from the 30-second mark, the video tells the audience to text ‘WATCHED TIL 30’ to the recommender of the video), we will know who actually watched for more than 30 seconds.
Choice of Audience: We sampled students from (1) underclassmen from other universities with a need for off-campus housing or (2) Stanford graduating seniors who will soon work in cities with a competitive housing market, as both would likely show very similar behavior as our target customer segment due to their (1) need for off-campus housing in competitive housing markets and (2) lack of experience in renting apartments. We sampled 11 students in total.
Observation: Over 45% of sampled students actually watched more than 30 seconds of the video (thus texted us back with the code ‘WATCHED TIL 30’, which was displayed from the 30-second mark onwards of the video). This exceeds 33%, thus the measurement indicates that our hypothesis is correct.
