At the beginning, it was difficult to come up with a persona for our project. However, once we were able to define our persona as Paula Johnson and find pictures that meet our description, it was a lot easier to come up with her goals and frustrations being an upper limb amputee. On a different note, creating a mind map was a lot easier for us. Since we had to attempt to complete the tasks on our own we were able to easily express our frustrations on the map and find what were the most common frustrations between all of them. After defining these frustrations, it was difficult to find solutions for them, especially because they were the hardest problems to deal with while completing tasks of “getting ready in the morning” on our own. One of our biggest problems, which was also one of Paula’s biggest frustrations, was the time it takes to complete all of these tasks. We had a hard time coming up with solutions to this, without just saying “just get a prosthetic arm”. After the conversations we had about all of this, we began to realize how truly hard it is to come up with solutions for an upper limb amputee. This put more into perspective for us while completing the project and doing the tasks on our own.
When we were writing our problem statements, it was easier for us to define the solutions because they had to be more broad. However, for some of the problems we feel as though we did not touch on solving them entirely. This adds to the struggle and frustrations we have for actual upper limb amputees and based on our own experiences we want to be able to find solutions so those unable can be able to do activities as fluently as we can.