At the start of this week I set out to finish Project 4 this week. While I didn’t manage to achieve that, I am pleased with the amount of progress I have made this week and I feel good about the pacing and the trajectory of the project.

To start the week, I finished my competitor review for five services that relate to my problem space. I found this part of the project interesting to research and seeing five different ‘competitors’ together on a table inspired some ideas for what my own product could be.

I quickly moved onto planning user interviews and writing a script of questions. To view this in detail, see my Miro Board here.

After deciding what I want to find out from my interviews and writing the script, I conducted five interviews with public transport users. I used Descript to transcribe each audio file, which I then formatted and highlighted in Word. I focused on Positive comments, Negative comments and neutral, informational Detail comments about the experience.

Once again, I used ChatGPT to summarise the entire transcript into a bullet point list which was extremely useful to read and gather an overview of the user’s comments.

Finally, I contacted a couple of people about expert interviews and planned out what sort of questions to ask and what I wanted to find out. I found this part of the project quite challenging – I found several potential people to interview but it was impossible to contact some of them – Matthew Wakefield, Head of Safety, Security & Sustainability at Greater Anglia for example – I could not find any contact details for, but would’ve found it interesting to interview him.

I have scheduled an interview with Norfolk County Council’s Head of Sustainable Transport, Jeremy Wiggin, which I am looking forward to and feel optimistic about. I am confident any insights he will be able to provide will be very relevant and helpful to my research and my project.

Summary & Next Week

I didn’t achieve as much as I hoped I would this week – I was slightly over-optimistic and didn’t get onto Personas or the VPC. After completing the interview on Monday though, I plan to take my time spending the rest of the week doing Personas and the VPC, wrapping up Project 4.