Blog post #4 - Define and Create Phases

 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 stereotypes that came to mind when thinking about what a young white woman in her 20s would enjoy. For example, we said she would like Trader Joe's based on the demographic we see when we go to shop there. We definitely made some aspects of Anne's life not entirely believable. For example, there is no way she would be able to live on the Lower West Side with an income of 85k. So, some more research could've gone into these demographic factors. Overall, I found creating Anne to be extremely helpful to the rest of the process because it humanized our target market, and we were able to keep her in the back of our minds as we went about the next steps of the process. 

Customer Journey Map

Our group decided to choose the Customer Journey Map option. We thought this made more sense with our service since the Customer Journey Map showed all the experiences our customers would go through, whereas the Empathy Map looked at the user as a whole and didn't go into sequential steps. We thought since our service was so formulaic, it would make the most sense to show all the steps our customers would take through using our service. The touchpoints were appealing to us because we were able to show how the user would interact with our brand, and we could show the specific pains our customers would have in addition to how we planned on countering these pains to make their experience better. Creating the Customer Journey Map definitely changed the way I think about my interactions with products because I realized how many touchpoints are available to me at a given time, especially in the "awareness" phase. I am constantly stopping on Instagram ads I see or admiring other people's belongings and making a mental note that I would like something similar. This was the hardest part of our process for me, simply because it required me to really step into the mind of our consumer.

Prototype

The prototype stage was not as challenging as I thought it would be. It was easy for me to not judge other ideas, but I was definitely critical of my own. I felt somewhat embarrassed writing certain ideas down because I didn't think they would be good enough. I think doing the pink sticky note activity really helped as I could freely express these ideas without fear of embarrassment. I think the most difficult aspect of creating our prototype was the fact that I couldn't make it perfect. I had to stop myself many times from revisiting our website to make edits and add new (but probably unnecessary) parts. I wanted it to be believable, but I had to stop myself from going too far and making it too professional because then the other team wouldn't have any feedback on it. Today in class, there was a lot of great feedback on the website that is going to help us make changes. For example, they recommended adding an extra step about shipping and also emphasizing the sustainability aspect more, as we noted this was something important to our persona, Anne. If I had "perfected" the website, they wouldn't have had the opportunity to come up with these suggestions. Creating the website prototype was my favorite part of this process and I am excited to improve it with our peers' suggestions.