Learning to Remember: Early Stage Exploration of user Requirements in an Education APP

We present a new approach, Mind Genomics, to understanding the needs of prospective users with respect to a teaching APP designed to promote improved memorization of important texts. Using small-scale experiments, using the systematically varied messages in the form of stories or vignettes, Mind Genomics uncovers the customer-requirements of the APP. These vignettes are combinations of ideas about the product, its use, and the benefits to be obtained. The pattern of reactions to these vignettes reveals which specific features and benefits ‘drive interest.’ Mind Genomics does not require the respondent to intellectualize the need, an intellectualization which introduces response biases, and perhaps demand an answer that the respondent may not know. Rather, the deconstruction of the pattern of the immediate responses assigned almost automatically and without deep thinking, clearly reveals the underlying needs. The results from this small-scale study suggest three radically different mind-set segments. Mind Genomics, finds application where the respondent’s job is to make decisions, and where one would like to reduce the biases due to what the respondent expects the appropriate answer to be. We show how Mind Genomics can become an early-stage, rapid, affordable, and scalable system for deep understanding of human judgments.