As I discussed before in the week 4 post of “What do I Learned”, pretotype is a technique to test an idea with more sincere feedback and more importantly without doing something expensive or laborious.
Hypothesis
In our modern world, subscription services have been increasing over time.
When lots of subscriptions, people can lose control over when they expend their money, forgetting to cancel the services that they didn’t use and making ant expenses that can’t be noticed easily for some people.
On the other hand, more and more websites offered a free trial period on change for the credit card from the user, often these services can be very attractive, but credit information is something very sensitive and clients may not trust the site.
By making a web browser extension, it can track when the service is used, when is going to trigger the payment, how trustful is the webpage and make suggestions of which services should be canceled.
Experiment description
For the experiment, I’m going to use other tools like calendars and note apps to write and track every service I use in my life for 1 week.
With this, I intend to know if is useful to have this information on hand, how often remind myself, and how often I use the services.
Validation
First, I’ll be making a note on Evernote with the services I use and the price of each one.
Next, on Google Calendar I’ll make reminders when the payment of the subscription is going to be.
By this, I’m going to pretend that I use a similar application and know-how useful or not it could be.
Results
The first phase of recollecting all the services I use was very annoying, it was not only writing down all the sites, but also the packages and different prices available, not to mention that those prices can change in the future.
With the calendar, just 1 service trigger it in my experiment, but I feel it is not so useful that as I may think in the first instance.
In the actual product, it could be a good idea to have this feature optional, because main services like Netflix you have them in mind more often.
Another barrier that can make this trickier to make it a reality is that is difficult to know if a website is safe, you don’t really know how they are going to treat your personal information and if the cancel button, then is going to work, this happened to me in a web service of music tutorials when after I canceled the subscription, they continue to try to charge a month to my card.
In conclusion, is not an impossible product and can be useful, but it needs some work that may take more time than just some weeks. Having all the past considerations, the tricky parts are getting the services that the user uses for the first time and the trust website measurer.
