Week 9

There was a lecture on design thinking, linking back to empathy and understand your audience/users. The thing that I got out of the lecture is the importance of perspective and how your audience will be use or be affected by your product or service. This is something I need to remember when we refine our app, especially since our initial app design was quite busy. 

For the workshop we had to form a small team and find a solution for poverty from the perspective of a persona that they had created from their research. From the map, we decided to choose the issue of transport and how the persona struggles to carry her groceries from the supermarket and back to her house. It is also time consuming as it took about an hour each way. We came up with various solutions but the one we decided to present was a icecream-like food truck that goes to the bus stops everyday, and people will be able to purchase what they need without having to drive/or take the bus to the supermarket. The truck would have specials everyday e.g. meat, dairy, however they will always contain the necessity such as milk and bread. From this exercise, I learnt that all solutions does not need to be products but it can be a service to help with their issue. We have to look into the perspective of the user and see what suits the matter the best. Now we need to identify areas that we can improve by looking into our user perspectives - university students. 

For the second studio class we continued developing our ideas by doing more user testings. We manage to pitch our idea to tutors, students (our target audience) and some fourth years. They suggested that we really needed to work on how all touch points can be cohesive e.g. visuals, language, colours. So for the remainder of the class we tried to revise our topic a little more so we can have at least all of our touch points mocked up roughly for interim next week.