Going into the last week, I thought the “Define” process would be a walk in the park. We had done all the grunt work and had loads of rich data in front of us – what could go wrong?
Well, at first, nothing did. Though I unfortunately had to miss class the day we created personas, I was able to connect with my team before and after and look over the two that were created. Our two personas – Stressed but Social Sarah and Fatherly Frank – encapsulated the types of people we saw as targets for potential solutions. One important component of this process that we were able to learn is to not make your personas perfect – they should not be “ideal” in the sense that they are a perfect human, but rather, that they’re ideal for your specific focus. To achieve this, we made our personas as real as possible, honing in on personality flaws and concerns that seemed most prevalent after speaking with actual graduate students – attributes like having high stress levels, lots of debt, being stretched for time, and having difficulty “adulting”.
With two useful personas in hand, I was excited to move on to the empathy/journey mapping process – but this is where things began to get rocky. The first major team discussion centered around whether to use an empathy or journey map. On the one hand, we thought Sarah’s routine could be better encapsulated in a journey map. But on the other hand, we wanted to dig deeper into why and how graduate students seek familiarity within their home and an empathy map would help us better achieve that goal. In the end, we decided on an empathy map – but even now, I still feel a little concerned that maybe we made the wrong choice. Collectively, my team also had a lot of difficulty actually putting Post-it notes up for each category. We ended up going to the extremes and after reflecting, we realized that what was on the map wasn’t an accurate reflection of Sarah’s persona. In our empathy map, it seemed like she didn’t get along with her roommates and that they didn’t understand her stress. However, one of the critical parts of her persona was that she surrounded herself with students in similar situations and had close relationships with her roommates. Now that we made that realization, I think we will be able to effectively revamp our empathy map before next class and get back on the right path.