Blog Assignment 6

The Use of Personas in Product Development

For the first paragraph I would like to talk about creating personas to represent costumer segments and how to use them in the development of a new product. Before the class, when one thinks of creating a product for a segment one thinks of solving a problem they have. The focus is on the problem or the service, but after working on this project I noticed that it is not one or two things that are important, like tastes and say price preferences; it is everything. This is a bit difficult to explain, but what I am saying is that I learned to appreciate the actual practical advantages of using full investigated personas to develop new products and services because if you don’t focus on the whole person you will miss important details and your product will be a failure.  For example, as I already mentioned during the presentation, our tween persona Katy was incomplete without including her mother. Sure, we could have created a product that our persona would have loved and wanted to buy, but it would have been impossible for her to buy because her mother would have never allowed her to use it. We could have made so many mistakes if we had just focused on the problem and not the entire person. Moms worried about the kind of tips we would give tweens, they worried about body image issues with the scanner, and other stuff. In the end we had to work around those problems and create something that would satisfy both. For example all the mothers we talked to limit their daughter’s access to Facebook. With that in mind we redesigned our communication feature to make it a safer alternative to Facebook. Using the smartphone’s ability to detect each other with Bluetooth, our version only allows you to add people you know personally so no strangers can become “friends” with our persona.

Process Mapping

And for the second paragraph I would like to talk about Process Mapping, although I have to admit I might be cheating somewhere because I put it here for the same reasons I put using personas. After studying our tween persona we discovered that all the purchase processes at some point had to go through the mom. This is what gave us the clue that maybe she was really, really important. I had seen before how the process was important in Pricing and Distribution Channels class, but this was different; in here we looked outside the persona and also looked at its surroundings. We mostly focused on what kind of information the buyer needed to make a decisions and if he or she would need training using the product. Process Mapping is a more complete way of viewing the entire purchase from the moment of becoming aware of the product all the way to actually purchasing it.

What part of the project was of no value?

Can’t say any part had no value, but if I had to choose the part where I learned the least I would have to say it was while building the prototype. Most of the learning for this class happens in discovering how and why the persona does what it does. By the time you have a persona researched and a product idea to make its life better, there was very little left to learn at least for me. I thought the part where we built a physical and a digital prototype we were just putting our ideas on something, but the part with the most value for me was everything from the beginning to the part where we created the concept of the product. Everything after that involving the creation of the physical manifestation of the product was just work, but no learning of anything new there.

The emotions I felt during this project…

I guess the first one was rejection towards the project because I have very little interest in the fashion and make up industry and even less on tweens as a segment. But in the end I think this helped learn more than I would have learned with a segment closer to my areas of expertise. Working on this segment forced me to actually learn about a persona I knew nothing about.

The second feeling I remember was frustration because we had done a few interviews and we had yet to find a big revelation that would take us to a new idea for this persona.

In the end I do believe working with a group contributed to my learning, and not only because as a male there were things in this project I could just not do… like following tweens around the mall. But everybody had a way of looking at this and I think between the four of us we came up with a much better product than one of us alone could have imagined.