Blog 6: Group Project Reflections

I have learned a lot by having the opportunity to work on my Insight/Experience Audit and Prototype this semester. I was able to understand personas better as a result of working on this group project. I was also able to better understand about the process of gaining insights about our persona to create a product that truly was based on our customer.

Persona:

By developing our persona, Mr. and Mrs. McAllister, we were able to make sure that our focus stayed with our customer. This persona helped have an early and continuous focus on our users’ needs and goals by focusing on the user even before the development of the product. Before working on this project, we learned about the persona lifecycle, which, to me, was just a way to describe the target market of a product. I was not able to comprehend how marketers could start with the persona first and then come up with a product. I thought that marketers had to be very creative and make products based on a vague idea of who they thought would use it, and once the product was developed, they worried about learning more about the user.

After working on this project; however, I learned that this is the wrong approach to generate a product that truly reacts to the customers’ needs in order to cultivate a meaningful relationship with them. As my group dug deeper into what Mr. and Mrs. McAllister’s hobbies and lifestyle were, I still did not fully comprehend the importance of the persona. I did not comprehend it until we started to generate ideas about our product based on the insights we gathered.

Our persona was Mr. and Mrs. McAllister, an active, just-retired couple that enjoys an upper class lifestyle. They love to stay active with the community, and love to travel to exotic places. When we started to conduct surveys and interviews with couples that fit our persona, we were able to find out that some of our assumptions were wrong, while others were correct. We were also able to delve even deeper (I didn’t think this was possible since we put a lot of details into developing our persona).

By having a persona before we started to interview couples to generate insights, we were able to focus on a particular segment of just-retired couples instead of including everyone that was 50 in our interviewing part of our project. By having a detailed persona, we were able to gain insights about a specific target, and develop a product to that target.

When we started to look at all of the data we received about our couples, I was able to fully understand the importance of a persona. As I mentioned before, I thought you first developed the product and then marketed it. The thing is that, had we not developed a specific persona, we would have come up with something that might have been “cool” but would probably not fit the exact needs of our couple. For example, our couple needed an oven that kept them safe from the heat, but still looked modern. Had we not talked to our couples, we would have thought that the couple liked old-fashioned appliances due to our assumption that they didn’t understand how to use modern technology very well. I’m sure that there are 50-year olds that don’t understand how to use modern technology very well, but our couples did. If we had not developed this person, we would have interviewed any 50-year old and we would have thought our assumptions were validated when, in fact, they were wrong about every single person in this market.

Process of gaining insights to create a useful product:

I was able to better understand the process of gaining insights that would capture our couple’s desires. Before doing this project, I thought that generating insights meant asking the customer what they want, but according to “Turn Customer Input Into Innovation,” this is incorrect. We must ask them what they want our product to do for them. By doing this, we were able to gain the insight that they wanted a product that made their kitchen safer for them and for the guests that they have over on occasions. By us getting deeper into their thoughts through using qualitative methods such as open-ended questions during our interviews, and the image collage, we were able to understand our couples better. We took heed of the advice that Professor Walls gave us to dive into ambiguous words such as “safer” and “more comfortable”. By us delving deeper into these ambiguous words and asking why they used the kitchen, we were able to not only understand our couples, we were able to understand what they wanted from their kitchen. What their pain points were. What they loved about their kitchen. How they used the kitchen, etc.

The image collage was great for some of our couples, but when couples took the task to be literal, we did not gain that much information. For example, one of our couples said that they picked the image of soup because they liked soup. However, our qualitative methods generated a revolving theme of wanting safety. Three of our couples even described how they love to cook but constantly get burned when reaching over and getting the food out of the oven. Had we not used qualitative methods, we would not have generated these insights.

Qualitative methods are great, but quantitative methods validate the insights. Once we analyzed our data and generated a rough draft of our product, we took it back to our couples. We had them rank certain features based on importance. Had we not done this, we could have created a product that was all wrong for our couples. How did we know that we hadn’t made the wrong assumptions, or that we interpreted their open responses wrong? Thankfully, based on our quantitative approach, we were able to conclude that we were not wrong. We were able to gain even more feedback about our product that was highly useful in creating a product that truly is customer-centric. We had thought that our couples’ need for good-looking, modern kitchen appliances meant that they would want a shiny black oven. All of our couples disagreed. They actually preferred stainless steel. This helped me understand the need of both methods: qualitative and quantitative methods.

This also helped me really understand the need for a prototype. Had we not had a prototype, our couples would have not given us as valuable feedback and information about how to improve it. This gave them a tangible product that they were able to touch and see so their feedback was more exploratory rather than imaginative and limited.

Feelings about the group process:

I feel like working with my group contributed to my learning of this material. We all had different ideas, and each of us had paid attention to different things when our couples talked about themselves. We each had different perspectives that helped us develop our persona, prototype, and interview couples. These perspectives helped us make sure every little detail and aspect of our product really did fit the insights that we gained. I feel that we had a good mix of personalities, which will help me learn how to work with different personalities when I am in the “real world” working in marketing teams.

I was the detail-oriented person, and I shared the leadership role with Jacklyn. Bailey always gave new ideas and expanded on ideas in our group while Jason gave us the non-marketing perspective we needed to make sure that our prototype gave a holistic experience to our couples. Derek was the most troublesome, but we were able to learn how to use it to our advantage by questioning our assumptions along the way. He would be the only part of our group experience that made me have a negative emotional reaction during our group project, but I learned to work with it, which gives a useful application to the real world. Our group was able to make sure we made each process right, which helped me understand the process even better.

The only part of our project that was nerve-wrecking was finding couples to interview. We didn’t really know too many couples that fit our persona; therefore, we started getting really scared. We ended up having to get creative and finding couples through our professors, which really helped us find these difficult to reach (at least for us it was) couples.

I feel that having Professor Walls guide us throughout the process was also wonderful. Thanks to his feedback, we were able to understand that we needed to make sure that we gained insights before creating our product. Had he not guided us in this way, we would not have generated these insights and would have started on a product that we thought would be useful to our couples. In this way, we were able to understand that as marketers, we need not just throw another cool product out there to market, but we needed to develop a product that truly would make customers’ lives better… and I believe we did!