I don’t believe that our Personas, Journey Maps or Empathy maps alone have given our project a sense of direction. However, I don’t believe that they’ve impeded us from making the right choices, either. In short, I think that the only thing keeping my group from making proper progress is the avoidable mistakes we’ve made during this process. To be honest, our inability to follow directions has hindered us all semester. It’s an extremely avoidable problem that has to be solved for us to properly innovate the housing market. Although we’ve done a lot of good throughout our project, but we won’t progress in the right direction without doing the simple things correctly.
Our project scope is to improve undergraduate college housing with an emphasis on overall health of student tenants. During Part 1 of our project, our group did a good job executing each step. We recorded large amounts of good data in Secondary Research, Observation, and Interview stages. However, we began to see trouble when we would analyze each other’s data. Some of the time, we would get excited at a finding and jump to extremely premature conclusions about what our project’s final product or service would be. Other times, we made mistakes that could easily be avoided, like constructing an interview guide that was much too broad, finding research that strayed from our project scope, or coding our interviews incorrectly. The root of all of these problems is obviously that we failed to follow Professor Luchs’ instructions well enough to succeed. He warned us from making all of these mistakes, but we made them anyways. When we received a grade of 88 on Part 1 of our project, we were displeased because we knew we could perform better than we’d shown.
To begin Part 2 of the project, we communicated amongst one other that following Professor Luch’s instructions would be the key to our success. As we constructed our personas, we had his lecture slides up explaining how to make our personas and what they should emulate. Specifically, we paid attention to the key description, “The persona describes the archetype in ways that are relevant to your context, but not necessarily or exclusively about your product/service.” We wanted to make sure our persona included various details outside of the context of housing, and we did a great job with this. Actually, we did such a good job that when we finished our first draft, we realized that we didn’t include housing wants and needs at all!! We did add them, but the personas have much more to offer than that. We followed directions well during this step.
Although we did great work on our personas, we ran into trouble once more when creating Empathy and Journey Maps. The problems we had were the same as before – we weren’t following Professor Luchs’ instructions well enough. Our persona was fantastic! But as we began ventured into mapping creating our empathy map, we ran into some communication problems. Some group members believed we weren’t being specific enough, others thought we were being too specific, and none of us really knew exactly what we were supposed to be doing – we were just trying to emulate the examples of what Professor Luchs had shown us earlier in the class period. When Professor Luchs got to our group as he made his rounds, he quickly realized that we’d made a mistake. We should have made a journey map before an empathy map. This wasted the majority of a class period of group work and probably would have kept churning in the wrong direction had he not noticed this and steered us in the right direction. To mend our mistakes, we had to meet for an hour and a half outside of class in order to complete a proper journey map and an empathy map from that.
In conclusion, as our project progresses, we must make sure we properly follow Professor Luchs directions. I believe three things will help us improve:
- Giving Professor Luchs the proper amount of attention during his lectures
- Do the readings before class
- Take notes on the points he emphasizes
- Ask questions on what you don’t understand
- Communicating prior to beginning work among our group about the process we should follow