As a complete newcomer to the process of “design thinking,” I was surprised at how nuanced yet helpful each of the steps of defining were. Overall, I enjoyed this process and the formulaic steps associated with isolating problems to solve based on the company’s current state. Now I will break down my reactions to last week’s classes in greater detail.
NEW
The concept of the persona was extremely brand new to me, as I have never taken a marketing class. However, after having fun creating a “character,” I think that many of the qualities I attached to “Working Mommy” were not so original and in fact very similar to my own mom and her friends. I realized much of my inspiration for the character was drawn from a group that were the main users of Olay. It did not occur to me to try to capture a potential new customer, a younger woman. For this reason, I loved being able to hear what the rest of my group created because there were definitely some similarities, but I liked that we ended up choosing a persona who was most likely not a current customer of Olay, but she could be marketed to in order to become one. This slight challenge excited me because my group was ready to attack a new clientele with innovative, sustainable ideas. I still agree that this was the right choice because we could appeal to younger people who were probably more open-minded about trying a new trend.
USEFUL
During both persona creation and brainstorming with LP criteria along with “How might we” statements, I found it useful to work individually first then chat as a group. I have sometimes done this previously in group work, but I find myself and other peers never fully flesh out our own ideas first in order to stand by them confidently when we share, usually they end up blending together and immediately building on top of each other. Therefore, I loved that we all worked alone because we ended up sharing 9 different LP subset criteria, which forced me to consider new perspectives that I had not even thought of before and vice versa for my team members. Even after writing out the subset, it was great practice to have to articulate the reasoning behind my choices because saying my rationale allowed help me clarify what was truly the most important focus for the company, especially compared to everyone else’s presentation of their ideas. I definitely plan on continuing the process of thinking as individuals before coming together as a group in order to gain the most insightful and diverse ideas for all of my future group work endeavors. Additionally, this experience of identifying problems which can lead to solutions in a specific format “how might we” statements made me think about what I had learned in my wellness class about the way you frame things in your head. In that class, we discussed how even changing the simple wording of “I have to do x, y, and z” versus “It would be in my best interest to take my time to accomplish x, y, and z” makes you so much more productive and less stressed out about all that needs to be done. I loved how the HMW statements functioned as a phrase to get my group jazzed about innovating.
CHALLENGING
Hands down, the most challenging part of the Define step was the “How might we” statements because I struggled with balancing not making them too broad or too general. Even after I had formulated several for our four LP subset categories, some of them I still did not love. It was interesting that some of them were so similar and others were alternatively different, so it was tricky trying to combine the similar ones into one succinct HMW statement. Also it was a little bit of a struggle letting certain HMW statements go because we had to clarify what were the three most important focuses for solution generation based on the statements. For instance, even though I loved the statement along the lines of “how might we improve the formulas of products to have more natural, organic materials that do not degrade humans or the environment,” our group agreed that we preferred to focus more on increasing the lifespan and durability of packaging to improve sustainability in a different way for the company.
SURPRISING
I was most surprised that even at the start of the second day of the Define process there seemed to be so many diverging ideas, but in the end we were able to reach a conclusion through the voting and deliberation steps. We were able to deduce the connections between the problems that we wanted to tackle together. Even our final three HMW statements connected so well together which I hope will allow us to find a natural design process flow for the next steps of the method.