Reflection Statement
By creating a persona, this helped our team focus on the actual goals and frustrations a user may experience when trying to cook with the use of only one arm. The project showed us the properties of a product that would fill the needs of our potential user without forcing us to commit to a product design or idea too early. The solution goals were particularly helpful in showing us how related all of the problems we faced in shadowing were. Most of our problems were based on the idea of stabilizing and controlling different aspects of cooking such as holding a tomato to cut it or gripping and twisting a potato to peel it. We found stabilization to be the most difficult problem area while performing tasks with one arm because, for most activities, you are using one hand to act on the item and the other to keep it in place.
The project is going very well and our team is excited to move on to the design stage of the process. We learned that there are a plethora of associated problems with cooking. That being said, it is imperative that as we progress we refine our problems into areas that can produce an innovative and practical product. The previous steps of the project have helped us in the discovery and exploration phase of the problems faced by our users and have illuminated the needs and problem areas to be addressed as we move to design and development.
As we move forward we want to develop concrete ideas and solutions to the problems we have discovered and focus on specific areas of problems. In the coming weeks we want to begin coming up with physical solutions to these problems to help Julie achieve her goals and overcome the obstacles she has faced in cooking with the use of only one arm.