Maya Sardar's BUAD 451 Blog

 Customer Persona The interviews were the most important part for our group when we made our persona, Anne. She is 25 years old, educated, single, and loves art and upcycling. Our interviews gave us takeaways about what people near our target group's age were looking for in their homes. They specifically discussed how affordability is the most important thing to them. They also stressed comfort and personal style as two important factors they considered when looking for home furnishings. We incorporated all these ideas into Anne, making her someone who sincerely values affordability but also wants to create an environment that she feels comfortable in and can take pride in owning . Anne was greatly inspired by the people in our lives. For me, these people were specifically the ones moving to New York City post-graduation. For example, my one friend moving to New York had a lot of similar style preferences to Anne and enjoys crafting and upcycling. I think we also relied on stereot...

 I enjoyed the Discover Phase of our Design Thinking process, including the Secondary Research, Observation, and Interviewing work we conducted. Certain parts of this phase were easier than others for me. I was able to play into my strengths for some, but for others, I had to push myself to get out of my comfort zone.  I felt like I was able to complete the secondary research phase well. My team started by creating a list of questions we needed answered, then researched on our own, and finally came together to triangulate our findings. I am experienced in conducting secondary research, and I consider it one of my strengths. I enjoy the formulaic nature of creating questions we want answers to and then finding those answers through data. I do secondary research often in my psychology work. However, a challenge I faced in our class was that I was researching in a nonscientific field, which I am not as familiar with. We focused on home furnishings, so I was looking at industry tr...

 I thought that the Ideo Shopping Cart experience was a great example of what design thinking looks like in a corporation.  I noticed a few similarities to what our class did. First, their design thinking team was made up of an "eclectic group," as they had psychologists, marketers, scientists, and more. That is similar to our class because we all have different backgrounds and majors. For example, at my table, Julia is interested in psychology, Ian is interested in the law, and I am interested in the arts. We therefore bring a very different perspective to how we go about the design thinking process and the ideas we generate. Second, they started their process by going straight to their consumers and the people who actually use shopping carts. We did something similar when we interviewed our classmate to figure out what we could make better about their mobile phone experience. Starting with the consumer is a core part of the design thinking process and it is always important...

Introduction My name is Maya Sardar, and I am a senior studying marketing and psychology.  I am taking Customer Insights for Innovation because I want to understand how to keep customers' needs at the center of my business so they trust and respect my product. I am looking forward to having a group project where we get to practice our market research skills and use the Design Thinking process. I took Professor Luchs' Sustainability Inspired Innovation & Design class where I got familiar with the Design Thinking process. In Professor Luchs' class, we were specifically focused on how sustainability needs to be at the forefront of innovation. In our semester-long project, my group selected a company, created a persona, and took steps to create a sustainable and innovative end product. Our company was Dove and the end product was "Simply Dove," a body wash concentrate to reduce waste and save time. It truly changed the way I thought about innovation and the defini...