Jan in the Street: What My Neighbors Really Want.

"I built a chatbot to help answer questions about shops along Jan Pieter Heijestraat as well as trash information for our street."

This week, I showed the Jan chatbot (read here for what lead to Jan MVP) to both my neighbors and colleagues to gather feedback on its usefulness. The best responses came when I kept Jan's introduction simple—“It’s like asking a neighbor who always knows the answer.” When I overexplained, I lost people. When I focused on what Jan does instead of how it works, they got it instantly.

What People Want Jan to Do Next

Based on these conversations, here are some of the key capabilities people would like to see added to Jan.

?? Dutch Language Support Since we’re in the Netherlands, this was an obvious one. Having Jan respond in Dutch would make it feel more local and accessible, especially for my older Dutch neighbors who simply prefer Dutch in daily interactions. ??

?? Pharmacy Availability Parents, in particular, wanted quick access to pharmacy opening hours. This makes sense—though I still don’t understand why the same pharmacies have different opening hours depending on the day. ??

?? Community Lending The need for borrowing and lending tools (like a ladder) came up again. This reinforces one of my original goals—to make it easier for neighbors to help each other. The challenge? Avoiding spam. Nobody wants their chat flooded with unwanted messages, so I’ll need to find a way to make this work without creating noise. ??

?? Arriving Tram Schedule Some suggested adding real-time tram arrival times. Personally, I rely on Google Maps for transit updates, and since it already does a great job, I’ll revisit this idea only if I hear the same request from more people. ??

?? Renovation Trash Bin Collection Updates With endless construction projects in the neighborhood, some people wanted updates on when renovation waste containers would be removed. I looked into it—this specific data isn’t readily available, but in the process I discovered the Amsterdam’s data portal. I’ll explore what public information is available can be tapped into for useful use cases. ??

Next Steps

I’ll start enabling the ?? use cases that people actually want on Jan while also tackling the challenge of my banned WhatsApp Business account (still a work in progress).

Also, I really need to practice explaining my product better—At work, I’ve been too reliant on my researcher to talk to users. Time to get back to basics. Less jargon, more clarity.

That’s it for now—till next time!

This is a series of posts where I share my observations of the world around me. I don’t claim to have the answers, but I believe better questions can lead to richer discussions and bring us closer to meaningful progress.