We found this portion of the project to be very insightful. We were able to think about many issues that our persona would encounter outside of the tasks we had practiced. Creating the persona gave us empathy for real-life situations, beyond just the small tasks of what we were doing. Here, we established the economic, social and other external factors that influenced the minuscule issues we are trying to accomplish. For example, we realized that someone who was a victim of a work-related accident may not have an extensive amount of money to spend on extra products for their laundry process. Also, caring for a child would add another interesting challenge in that many of the processes may need to accommodate for both the person with one hand and the child.
Some additional problems that were brought to light when we were mind-mapping included hanging clothes. This was something that ended up being identified as one of our main issues. We now recognize the importance of mind-mapping and brainstorming as it can lead to key problems and unique solutions that may originally be missed in the first lines of thought.
We feel that our project is making good progress. Overall, we have identified many more problems than anticipated and we feel that our persona gives us a better idea of what we’re designing for. From this, we are excited to produce solutions that will fit this persona and solve a wide variety of problems.
Within our team, we have been working very cooperatively. We divide some of our work, but our most productive moments come from collaboration. These are where our best ideas have come from. Although we lost a team member, Yanggangzheng, we have still been able to keep up with the work and feel that we are making good progress.