This week was the interchange week this term, which means we have no scheduled lessons and we have some time to catch up with our work and also have the opportunity to try out other courses for a day, hence the name interchange. I decided this year to not take part in any interchange activities as I felt I needed both a mental break and time to allow myself to completely catch up on my work and touch up on areas I felt I could do a bit better in, which I was able to do.
In this week, I mainly focused on project 4 in the Design for Good project, trying to get it well under way so that I could go back to uni after this week feeling both refreshed and up to date on my work, as I was feeling at a low ebb because I was really run-down and over worked, so I felt I really needed this time to catch up. I found this week very beneficial as it allowed me to think through everything to a more refined level and properly tick things off of my list. This week I managed to finish my competitor reviews, personas, and finally created the questions for both my user interviews and expert interviews, so I was completely ready for heading back to uni on the Monday. I started the week with my competitor reviews as I felt it would set me off well for the rest of the aspects for the project because it would give me insights into what other companies had created and how I could make my app unique in comparison to them and how I could work on that further and allow their websites or applications to help me to stem ideas from and make my app better than it could have been.
I then started to create my provisional personas, whereby I was making assumptions on what I think the type of person would be to use the application and how it would benefit them, what they do as a career, who they are as a person and why they would need to use it. This allowed me to get a good understanding of the possible target audience for my app because it got me thinking what audiences I need to target. It also allowed me to consider further questions that I could ask in my user interviews, so I can make the most accurate primary personas further in this section. After some ideation and deliberation, the target audience that I felt was most compatible with my app would be single parents, trying to save money; students trying to save money; teachers who want to teach their students to be sustainable and finally environmentalists, who just want to improve the environment. I felt these were good personas as it allowed me to gain insights into how I would tailor my design to fit with these targets. I also considered what aesthetic preferences they would have in terms of guessing from their personality traits I have given them, and they all came to whites, greens and blues, with a mixture of a clean aesthetic and a kind of bohemian style; both of white I think would be good visual points to start off with. I then went on to create an empathy map for my provisional personas, to gain a further insight into what I think the people’s likes/dislikes would be what what they feel and what they want to do about it; this was helpful as it allowed me to organise the various aspirations I gave them into sections so it was easier to comprehend. From this, I then produced a subject map for common behavioural variables so I could get an essence of where I think they would be in comparison to each other, to see how the app target audience could vary from each other. Finally, in this section, I started to create an affinity map; where by I put the information I generated for the provisional personas, and had an area where I would then include sticky notes from the user interviews, so that I could then I had all the information together, allowing me to then as accurately as I can, I could create the correct personas for my app design.
Once I had finished this, I then decided to start getting ready with writing the questions for my user interviews so I could be as ready as I could be for going back to university on the following Monday. After some looking through the information I had, I started to jot down some things I wanted to learn so I could then produce questions from those points. I decided I wanted to learn as much as I could about various peoples habits in terms of food waste now, and ask their opinions on this. Some of the questions I came up with were “How much do you know about food waste?” “Do you think that food waste is a growing concern?” “Do you think there is any more you could do in order to minimise your food waste?” “How informed are you on world hunger?” and “What would you say your most common wasted food would be?”. I am hoping that these questions will allow me to gain insights into various users real life experiences with the idea of food waste and world hunger and find out how and where they have found out what they know; in hopes that it will help me to create my app to a more tailored extent and also, help me to finish off my primary personas.
Overall, this week was quite a positive one, I was able to come home and so I was able to rest and take time to recuperate and get myself together before going back.
