Project Reflection

One topic that I understood more after working on this project is the empathizing phase of the design process. This phase required us to create a persona before even beginning our research. After numerous semesters filled with class projects, it felt as though the first step to tackling every problem was to begin by researching. The project and course changed that way of thinking for me because I learned that creating a persona on whom you can base your research actually simplifies the research phase. Numerous personae can be derived from the millennial group, so it was important that we narrowed down our target and focused on one type of person. It was much easier to frame our research around one persona instead of trying to include everyone between the ages of 20 and 30. Creating our persona, however, was a challenging process in itself. We weren’t used to dealing with people outside of our age group nor with people going through a stage of life different from the one we are going through, so putting ourselves in Adam and Julie’s shoes was more difficult than it seemed. Everything we came up with was an assumption and we often tried to give them qualities that we possessed. Not being 100 percent confident of what our made-up couple did and how they acted exactly was frustrating at times because I felt as if this lack of knowledge would hurt our strategies and research in the future. As we proceeded to the next stages of the project, however, I learned that it was okay to make educated assumptions about our persona and that it would inevitably evolve as we learned more about it.

Another skill I have a better understanding of is gaining insights and the approaches that can be taken to do so. Prior to taking this course, I would always resort to Googling things or scouring through the university’s databases to gather information about a project topic. When I took Information and Analysis, I began experimenting with simple laddering interviews and surveys.  Besides these common research techniques, I really had no idea what else I could do to learn more about the problem in question. Creating a survey with Qualtrics provides you with hard numbers and the graphs you can derive from it are neat things to include in your power points. The data obtained from surveys, however, was not going to suffice for this project. In fact, gathering quantitative data to take one these tasks wasn't necessary at all. Working on this project opened a door to new methods of probing for key insights and the generative research methods we learned in class enabled us to gather insightful information. It was exciting to know that we were each gathering raw data that would later help us develop our problem statements. For past school projects, I can’t count the number of hours I've spent searching through secondary online resources trying to gather information. The most annoying part about that is that you often collect irrelevant news that you don’t end up using at all. All of the feedback we each retrieved from the research participants, however, in one way or another contributed to the developing new ideas for our prototype. Combining the data each of us collected was another exciting aspect in this process. When our group convened to analyze the information that we each had gathered, we noticed that many of our our couples enjoyed cooking or eating meals together, as we had assumed while creating our personas. What seems like a minor insignificant detail to anyone else actually guided us to our final prototype. Overall, this process allowed me to realize that qualitative feedback, significantly enhances your ability to reach valuable insights. 

My intention isn't to sound cliche, but I feel that all parts of the project were very necessary and useful, as they can be applied to other projects outside of this classroom and, further, outside of McCombs. While I focused on two main topics in the above paragraphs, it was inevitable for me to discuss the other phases of the project, indicating that they each play a crucial role in the process.

In the beginning, I was apprehensive about working on this project because I was used to having detailed guidelines for every group project had been faced with at school. The Target project and this class represented the complete opposite of what I had been ‘trained’ to do. As we entered each phase, however, I gained more confidence and felt more comfortable with working on this assignment. For me, the most exciting part of the entire process was interviewing our persona and obtaining their feedback. I really enjoyed seeing the our own research being put to use, as we identified our insights and formulated our problem statements that eventually led to developing a prototype. Working with the people in my group made the empathizing and prototyping phases of the project more enjoyable. We weren't afraid to daydream or get carried away with an idea if we felt passionately about it. At the end of the day, we found a way to make these ideas be more realistic and in line with our project goal and to reach a consensus.

My experiences in this course and in being part of the Target project have allowed me to truly value each component of the design process. I will no longer underestimate the methods of gaining and evaluating insights that are needed for innovation.