• “What progress has your team made so far? Have any new ideas, questions or challenges arisen from this work?”

We have sent out and received responses to a survey (more information on this comes later on). Alex had the idea of having the dumpling packs not be sold as all one ‘flavor’ (where all the soup-dumplings in a pack have the same soup filling), but that the packs would hold different kinds of dumplings.

  • “What process have you and your group made on collecting data?”

We sent out a survey for people to answer (Ex: I posted a link to the survey on my moments) , some of the questions were: “What soups do you like and would like to see in a soup-dumpling?”, “Where would you expect to find such a product (soup-dumpling with different ‘soup filling’ options)?”, and “How do you think the product should be sold?”.

    • “How was it collected?”

At least something that I did, was post a link to the survey on my moments, in hopes friends and family (people in my contacts) would see and answer the form.

And in terms of looking at the data: the survey was created using Office Forms, which is able to not only show responses, but even present them in appropriate ways (Ex: graphs) and can help provide helpful data/ analysis of them: like being able to hover over an answer in a graph (assumably from a “choice” question”) and see not only how many chose it, but also what percentage of responses that answer had (this is seen it the pie charts (at least).)

Here is a link to see survey results: https://forms.office.com/Pages/DesignPageV2.aspx?lang=en-US&subpage=design&FormId=mg0rwMPcY0mWYd9SbtulftUJrBzVH8NKn9T1wsZc99dUQTNYTUJQNTE2TkdXNk1WTVMwRE82M1A5UC4u&Token=fbf416b82984435f8141fb2d8d89116e  

    • “How has that supported your design choices?”

The data from the survey led to certain conclusions and decisions: (I looked at an email I sent to team mates to remember some of the reasoning)

      • That the dumplings would be sold in packs (6/8 people chose that, and 1 out of the remaining 2/8 chose that it didn’t matter).
      • That the packs would be packs of 6: Because when I listed out all the answers (in cases were the answer was like “1-3” I would list it as “1,2,3”) and 6 appeared the most amount of times (4 times), the median (if I did it correctly) was 6, and the average was 6.5.
      • We don’t need to worry about making the dumplings see through (or the option of such) because no one said they wanted that. Out of the choices of ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’ ,’doesn’t matter’. ‘Doesn’t matter’ had the most votes with 4/8. (followed by ‘maybe’ with 3/8.)
      • When it came to the question on where people expected to find such a product, the results were relatively split/close. However, ‘Restaurant’ did win with 5/15 (it was a multiple choice question), followed by ‘Themepark’ (4/15), ‘Nightmarket’ and ‘a store’ (both 3/15) (‘other’ got 0/15). So it made sense to at least go with Resturant, as that was what the data supported.

However, in terms of pricing, Yifan had already looked at theme park pricing. So we ended up combining restaurant and theme park, by saying theme park restaurant. (This may not have been the sole reason, but still).

  • “Have you worked on visual or financial modelling? If so, provide some insight into those processes.”

Kind of.

As mentioned earlier, in an email Yifan concluded that in “tourist areas” “the price […] may be slightly higher”: giving the price range of “between Rmb15 and Rmb25”.

However, one would hope to also figure out the price that the survey data leads to, and to find the cost of making a pack of dumplings, and look at all those prices to figure out the price to ‘sell’ a pack for. (For which we would need a recipe, and while Alex does seem to have some ingredients, not all of them have measurements, so I think Mr. Landrum supported (not sure if he first recommended it- Alex’s list does include “Flour dough”) the idea of pre-made wraps and it would also be easier if we ‘used’ canned soup). (unfortunately though, the reason Alex was working on a recipe was in hopes to end up using it to make a physical product (unless I am mistaken), but we have run out of time, and will not be doing it).

But our last work class was last class, and I think we are ‘presenting’ tomorrow- so I am not optimistic. While it is true that I could try and make sure it gets done by tomorrow’s class, I don’t think that is going to happen.