To identify problem areas and solution goals, our team created a fictitious persona to help us brainstorm. We wanted our persona to represent an amputee from a third-world country so that we could focus our research on creating cheaper, sustainable solutions for our target audience.
We used this persona, and our experience immersing ourselves into the context of our persona, to create an elaborate mind-map.
This map helped us to identify the following problem areas:
PROBLEM AREA: Mixing & Stirring while keeping bowl still.
SOLUTION GOAL: Non-slip, lightweight, non stick for easy scraping
PROBLEM STATEMENT: Design a product that prevents a mixing container from moving around and allows the user to easily lift and pour out mixtures.
PROBLEM AREA: Chopping food without things rolling or falling onto the ground.
SOLUTION GOAL: Non-slip, motionless, able finely chop, keeps food on surface
PROBLEM STATEMENT: Design a product that can hold different foods in place so that one handed individuals will be able to cut them safely and sanitarily.
PROBLEM AREA: Lifting heavy pans out of the fire without burning self.
SOLUTION GOAL: safely remove food, not drop food, temperature control
PROBLEM STATEMENT: Design a product that allows for minimum physical stress on the user while lifting large pans from heat, while also maximizing efficiency and minimizing injury risk.
PROBLEM AREA: Spreading hummus while keeping naan still
SOLUTION GOAL: Careful/safe application, motionless naan, thorough and even spread
PROBLEM STATEMENT: Design a product that allows a user with one hand to spread food thoroughly without the food moving around.
PROBLEM AREA: Pouring heavy boiling water out while remaining safe.
SOLUTION GOAL: Easy grip, equal weight distribution, temperature control
PROBLEM STATEMENT: Design an intuitive product that allows for minimum physical stress on the user while pouring hot liquid from a large pot, while also maximizing efficiency and minimizing injury risk.
Activity Reflection
Overall, this phase of the design process was very experiential. Immersing ourselves into specific individualized problem needs allowed us to define our users problems. We learned how to create a detailed persona and draw insights from her fictitious experiences, frustrations and motivations. The article provided at the beginning of the assignment helped teach us about how to create a good persona. We learned that a good persona is believable. They should have a background story, frustrations, motivations and goals. We also decided that the best persona’s have a fictitious user quote to further specify their user needs.
Throughout our project we have been able to make multiple connections to our lecture topics and class readings. Our lecture on personas and problem need statements gave us a valuable basis for developing our five final problem statements. In the reading about how Fiskars keeps improving on its classic orange-handled scissors, we learned the importance of understanding the problem from our target markets perspective. We used this idea to create unique solutions to our problems with respect to people living in third world countries. Furthermore, we learned about the five core principles for approaching design, including immersing yourself in the context of use. We used this in our project when we performed several different cooking tasks with one hand to discover which tasks were the most challenging for us to execute.
Our group has been able to work efficiently together to quickly identify problem areas due to our earlier immersion in one-handed culinary tasks. The persona development activity helped us further clarify our target consumer. Our persona also helped define our problem statements and has prepared us for the next steps!
Our group felt this experience was very humbling, we have a new found empathy for the cooking process of the disabled. We feel working together will allow us to follow an innovative process that allows us to create solutions for the impaired to cook safely and efficiently.