During this course, the concept of persona was very interesting and useful for me as a person who worked at e-commerce industry. I already have heard of this concept before, but did not dare to think of actually applying it to a real world work because it sounded little bit vague and unrealistic to me. However, as our team developed our persona Chris, I felt that a certain techie in my mind was structuring to a real techie customer. We chose to create a persona called “techie” because this demographic is very open to innovation. However, it was difficult to build a persona, who represents all the types of people who fit into the framework. I think this is common situation in a real world, so we defined the nerdiness of our techie with techie bell curve to better understand what our target is and validated it in the survey and the interview later. It was certainly a creative step beyond traditional segmentation, which mainly focused on demographic facts. What I like most about the persona task was that it also reflected the sophisticated details for our target customers, which can be a crucial factor in the e-commerce.
Another thing I felt useful was ethnographic research method. I am familiar with traditional research method which our team also conducted. We did e-mail survey and face to face interview to get to know our persona’s desire and needs. However, when we conducted photo journal research, the unexpected results started to be discovered. In the survey, they seemed to be price sensitive, but in the photo journal, many techies pick cheap Wal-Mart or Chinese made products as one which they want to remove from their room. We also found out that techie’s main frustration comes from the clutters which take up their spaces in the room. One techie hated messy travel bags in a dressing room and another techie liked space saver shelf in his bathroom because it maximized the corner space. We discovered several useful insights from this photo journal research even though I did not expect that this method would be practical. Photo journal pulled techie’s unknown needs from their mind as they cannot answer those unconscious desires in the regular survey or interview.
Every step of the project was useful and helpful, but building a prototype was quite stressful and frustrating. As our prototype is man shelf that need complicate functions, it was hard to materialize the non-existing product. Furthermore, none of our team members were talented at artistic tasks, so creating a prototype was the most challenging task for us in a limited time and budget. However, I do think the process of creating prototype will be useful in a real world with enough time line, enough budget, and support from professional designer or sculpture.
Lastly, this project required a lot of feedbacks between team members. We sometimes experienced conflict each other because everyone has each one’s strong opinion and personal preference. When we could not reach to our conclusion which idea to develop to our prototype, it was good to listen to the outside opinion from the professor Stephen. Even techie’s response was quite biased, but we were sure that the professor’s response was subjective and trustful. Finally, with the professor’s mediation, we discussed again and were able to reach our conclusion. Working with team did help me to develop my theoretical learning from the class.
