Overview
Your team has collected a lot of information from your users and other secondary sources. This task will help you sort through your users’ problems and needs, identify actionable items, and translate everything into problem statements, which will give you a clear path towards designing a solution that addresses your users’ specific needs.
Step 1: Create a Persona
As a team, create a persona for whom your team will be designing. Recall that personas are fictitious but have concrete, specific information that represents and embodies your proposed primary user. Creating the persona now will help guide your design decisions later in the process. The goal of the persona is to keep the user’s goals, motivations, needs, and frustrations front and center.
Consider the following information for your persona:
- Brief demographic info such as name, age, employment/student info
- Motivations
- Goals
- Frustrations
- Images: find a stock photo for your user, and maybe 2-3 other images that represent their lifestyle. Remember to cite your sources! (The images don’t all have to have the same human being in them)
Create a page on your team’s website with your persona information. You can arrange your information however you like– note it does not have to be arranged in the same way as the samples in the resource article linked above.
Step 2: Create a Mindmap of Problems
As a team, create a large mindmap of all the problems you experienced while performing your one-handed tasks. You can start by writing out each individual problem in a list if you want, but then use that list to populate your mindmap. Use the whiteboards in the room to visually create your mindmap.
Look for trends among all of the problems and tasks, and use the visual aspect of a mindmap to see how everything is connected. Ideally, your team will come out of this activity with 4+ main problem areas, for example “grasping objects” or “safety”. Refer back to Creative Confidence page #213 if you want to see a sample mindmap.
Take a photo of your mindmap when you are finished, and/or convert it to a digital file.
Step 3: Identify Problem Areas & Solution Goals
For each of the problem areas from the mindmap, list the out the pertinent user needs and create related solution goals. Solution goals are anything that the future, yet-unnamed solution will provide/enable/allow/etc. The user needs should be based on your research/experiences from shadowing and research.
For example, a previous team did a project researching pet owners who travel with their pets, so for one problem area they came up with the following needs and solution goals:
Problem Area: Feeding the pet while it is traveling in its crate.
User Needs: Owner needs cleanliness while traveling (no messes) & ability to keep the pet contained while feeding; pet needs easy access to food and water.
Solution Goal: Cleanliness in crate, spill prevention, easy access to food and water while pet is contained.
Write out the user needs and solution goals for each of your main problem areas.
Step 4: Problem Statements
Your team will write one problem statement for each of your main problem areas. A problem statement is a short (often one sentence) directive that summarizes your design opportunity.
The problem statements should be open enough to allow for several distinct solutions for each problem, and as previously discussed in lecture, a problem statement is best phrased in terms of “what a solution should do, but not how it should do it.”
Therefore, our problem statements should identify only the attributes of a solution, but not identify an actual or specific solution. An example problem statement related to the project mentioned above might be:
Design a product that prevents pet food spills and allows the pet owner to easily feed the pet while the pet is contained in its crate.
Step 5: Reflection Statement
As a team, write up a short reflection statement (~300 words) about your experiences with this assignment. Consider any of the following: What did you learn? Did these tasks bring any clarity to your project? Why or why not? How is the project going for your team? What connections have you been able to make to our lecture topics or class readings? Have any comments or questions about the project?