Project Reflection

Persona

I’ll admit I was a little skeptic about the whole persona exercise. It all seems a little… cheesy? Maybe that’s not the right word, but I just didn’t buy into it at first. I think a big part of it has to do with how I’m personally against generalizations as a common practice that humans use to understand each other- In my opinion it’s led to a lot of misconceptions, unfairness, and hate. Building a persona is all about generalizations,  sorry that got a little preachy… moving on.

Building a persona for this class was actually one of the concepts I found to be most helpful. I’ve now used it in a case comp, my job, and other classes while presenting solutions. At first, I was uncomfortable with our persona building, since it was all based on assumption that came from previous experience, personal beliefs, and sometime just random guesses. But testing the assumptions was the fun part, as we dug deeper into who Cameron and Andrew were I was able to really understand their needs but more than that, their wants, fears, and dreams. It went a step above just understanding their lifestyle and what was missing from it, but empathizing to a point where I was comfortable making generalizations about their relationship. I think a relationship is one of the most complex things to understand in life. Trying to build a persona around one, was challenging. It also opened my eyes to how important it is in the process of marketing and innovation. It was the thing that allowed us to come to a good solution; it also facilitated discussion, eliminated some questions and gave some certainty to whom we were designing for.

In the future, whether it is a formal or informal persona, I think I am now programed to think about the customer/user/client in this way. This is not a bad thing. By using personal building in this class and in other activities this semester, I have produced some of my best ideas, products, and recommendations. I’ve never felt so confident in the foundation and rationale for my recommendations.

Prototyping

My second favorite process was prototyping. Which can be more challenging for some concepts and ideas than others. As a team we made a decision that the only way to convey our idea was to do a very detailed prototype. It was time consuming and elaborate, but I’m glad we made that decision. By pushing ourselves to create an advanced prototype we also forced the team to really think about the feasibility, usability, and functionality of our solution. We employed storyboarding to flush out all details of the app, and used animation to simulate the journey our persona would take.  By making the prototype, we realized that some of our functions would not be intuitive to the user and needed adjustments. In one case, we even nixed a whole idea- it did not fit with the rest of the initiatives and there was no good way to integrate it into our app.

Prototyping was also very helpful in getting honest feedback from our research subjects. We gathered some initial thoughts from them by verbally sharing our idea. They had very few constructive things to say, or at all. Once we shared the prototype they had many specific ideas, suggestions, and comments. The prototype helped them understand it.

I now think that building a prototype is a great way to organize ideas, and communicate them to third parties.

Research Design

This is tough. Design Thinking is a process; therefore, I understand the value of all the steps we took. I don’t think there was anything that wasn’t worth my time or was not valuable during the semester. There were some things I enjoyed more than others. Research design was probably my least favorite (but like I said, still valuable). This is because doing research is really hard. And qualitative research is the one we’ve probably done the least of. I felt unprepared to tackle this portion of the project and I felt like my team was winging it more in this section than all the others. For example, we hoped that our questions would lead to good answers and that our methodology would be unbiased but it was mostly judgment calls. Research like this is difficult, and we did the best we could, but we probably had a lot of research design flaws we were able to compensate with other parts of the process.

The Team

I’m in love with my team. No joke, this has been the best team experience I’ve had in college with a randomly assigned group of people. We balanced and complimented each other so well. We lovingly called each other out, covered for one another when life happened, and trusted the team to pull through in the end. Being part of this team, not only helped me learn this process, but was also the reason I enjoyed it so much.

There were some stressful moments and races against the clock, but I believe that mostly we felt proud, happy, and confident of the content we were creating for this class. It was very encouraging to see the work and chemistry translated into great feedback from our instructor. The results were noticeable: a solid recommendation, a great prototype, an understanding of the problem and persona, and a team happy hour in the near future.