This week we spent our time in class developing personas that we will use when we begin our ‘create’ process. Personas are supposed to help us prioritize decisions about our product and will help us to guide our next actions in a more consistent direction. Our creation of ‘Middle-Class Miranda’ is meant to stand as a target for the type of college student we are hoping to market towards.
I think the creation of a persona and subsequent journey map helped our project gain a little more sense of direction, but I still have some reservations about where we’re heading. Our readings mentioned many things about creating personas that I tangibly experienced once we began the process, and these developed my reservations. First, the subjectivity present in the creation of a persona was evident as soon as our team began brainstorming. It was difficult to come up with the persona of a college student that we all agreed on as college students ourselves. It was evident that we were all projecting a little bit of ourselves into this persona, whether it was making them more introverted or extroverted, involved in Greek life, very focused about studying or not, or their desire to party a lot or not. The idea was to project the identities of our interview subjects into our persona, but I felt as if we were all trying to project ourselves into the persona instead.
Consolidating data from our interviews based on common problems was difficult to do as well. There are wide range of common problems that college students experience with their living situations. This was evident in our interviews. However, I feel as if we are having trouble differentiating between user problems that we found in our interviews, user problems that we have personally experienced, and problems that we have felt attached to since the beginning of our project. This is making the project continue to feel as if there’s a lack of focus, despite the new and more concise steps that we have been taking this week.
I will admit that I was and still kind of am skeptical of the persona process (perhaps because I have not had enough time to get used to the idea yet). I’m finding it difficult to get used to the idea of having a target customer within the user group we already chose. I understand that if we try to cater to everyone’s needs that our focus will be much too broad. However, I feel that we are alienating a large group of people who aren’t as social as Middle-Class Miranda is by focusing on only her. As the example in the reading said about “excluding corporate users” (Chen, 32), I felt as if we were leaving out a large pool of potential customers by just focusing on the socialite. Even then, there’s an infinite number of personality types on a college campus and we need to focus on only one or two personas for the purposes of this project. Despite this, I think we will benefit from creating an additional one or two personas that we can compare. Our group is continuing to work towards this and I hope that with time our project will continue to gain focus.
Sources:
Chen, Robert, and Jeanny Liu. “Personas: Powerful Tool for Designers.” Design Thinking – New Product Development Essentials from the PDMA. 1 Vol. , 2015. 27. Print.