The main concept that
I better understand as a result of working on our group project is that of
creating a persona. Our group was given
the task of recreating the Samsung Galaxy Note for a couple who lived together,
without children. They could be married
or not. Having never lived with a
partner I had the opportunity to learn much more about this persona and how it
could be used to redesign the Note. It
is always easiest to look at a project from your own point of view. Given a specific persona to dig into, get to
know and create recommendations based on their specific pain points, preferences
and needs is a much different task. Our
group entrenched ourselves in getting to know our couple, who we fondly named
Zack and Zoe. We considered couples that
we knew, cultural knowledge that we had, and several group members’ own
experience living with a significant other.
We acknowledged every assumption that we had made by evaluating actual
couples in this position via focus groups.
Many of our assumptions were validated while many were not. But, the product that we created in the end
was created around the personas of Zack and Zoe and what would be most useful
for their lives.
A second main concept
that related to the personas that we created was that of creating a problem
statement. Once we got a good handle on
the personas that we were working with, we had to fully understand their main
issues, specifically issues that the Samsung Galaxy Note could evolve to
solve. One way that we did this within
our group was to originally concentrate on what created the most conflict in
their lives. After our focus group we
had one major thing that stood out as a pain point: organizing and coordinating
their schedules. While at business
school most of us are forced out of necessity and habit to keep our Outlook
calendars extremely up to date, this is not the case with the average person. Every 15 minute meeting, week long trips and
even due dates are all updated on a daily basis on our phones and
computers. While many couples try to
duplicate this process and specifically share a calendar to organize their
lives as a cohesive unit, the reality is that the attempts often are not
successful. Not only that, but the
individuals often have different ways that they stay organized. Some use written calendars, some do notes in
their phone, and some just use their memories (much to the terror of their
significant other). Utilizing these
insights we were able to create a problem statement that took these major
problems into account. An all-encompassing
problem statement provided details of the issue at hand, and was extremely
useful when defining how we were looking to find a solution.
The part of the
project that was least useful for our group was creating a rough
prototype. This was specifically
difficult for us and I am assuming the rest of the class, because our product
was based on technology. As we are not
computer scientists or engineers, it was difficult to create an actually rough
prototype. While we wrote out specifics
of how we planned to create our product (if possible), we only created a
general visual of how we believed it should look. We were asked to create more visuals in our
feedback, but this was extremely difficult considering our lack of design
ability. In addition, we were tasked
with thinking about technology years out when creating our product, yet we have
no way to know if what we have created is at all possible. Lastly, this part of the project was mostly
duplicated in our final video presentation.
Cutting out this part of the project would allow us to focus more energy
on the videos that we were creating and build out more of the features that we
wanted to invest further in in the video.
From the first part of the project,
a majority of our group clicked. We were
lucky enough to be handed a fifth player in our group, someone who was not
taking the class for credit, yet was fully committed and very capable. With two first years and two second years
(besides our 5th member) my initial assumption was that the first
years would take over the project and the second years would step up just as
needed. This was not the case. One particular second year that I worked with
surprised me completely by being an incredible group member. The witty banter between him and one of the
first years contributed not only to the demeanor of the group, but also to the
creativity that abounded us. Like all
groups, the work put in by each member was not completely equal. As this is a public blog, I will not be
specific, but the reality is that four out of five of the members were
excellent group members, with a great report who were efficient and did top of
the line work. I feel like our
efficiency was only trumped by the quality of our work. These are my two biggest priorities when
working in a group, especially with the number of assignments that we had to do
with our group and the workload of the semester. I was not the only one in my group who had
high expectations for the quality of their work. This was evident with the two in-class
prototypes that we created—winning the first challenge of creating a child’s
toy that helped them go to sleep, and deserving to win the second challenge
when we created the localization aggregator LoCool. We did not stop working on the project once
we left class, and created better products because of our high standards. One of the main things that I learned from
this project was to focus on those who worked best together instead of being
upset with those that do not live up to our expectations. When I did that, and focused on the work of
our more committed members, I can honestly say that this is one of the better
groups that I have worked with during my MBA career. And Zack and Zoe are definitely the most
entertaining personas that I have worked with as well.
