I found that developing both personas and a journey map helped narrow down the focus of our project. After interviewing, I unintentionally tended to think of the focus of our project as the two people I interviewed – my sister and my sorority big. But going into the persona creation process I knew we were brainstorming a typical consumer – derived from all our primary research. We wanted characteristics from a variety of people in our scope to come together and create a persona. The dimensions we decided to focus on were
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Daily Schedule
- Fears & Motivations
- Social Desire / Engagement
- Goals
The last dimension we decided to add was psychographics because we felt it was important to include if they were an extrovert, introvert, outgoing, or shy, for example, to get at their relationship with community building within the context of the housing industry. We were thinking that introverts and extroverts probably seek communities in different ways – perhaps an introvert would prefer to meet and build community within their apartment building or through friends of friends.
When we were adding sticky notes to the board of our characteristics within each dimension we noticed that some notes were contradictory. When we multi-voted, we decided that because we had contradictory characteristics that we still found were relevant, we would create 2 separate persons, and potentially an anti-persona.
As for the journey map, we decided to choose this over an empathy map because our scope is still fairly broad. We are looking at millennials building community within the context of the housing industry and felt that there were multiple stages that would benefit by remaining separate. We decided to focus on a typical day for our first persona, Malia. At first, we were thinking this day was a typical Friday, but we realized that was too narrow of a scope and that choosing Friday didn’t necessarily add value or context to our project.
After coming up with what she hears, sees, thinks, and feels were decided to move onto pains and gains. At the beginning of this stage, we ran into the problem of forgetting the scope of the project. We had gotten so into Malia’s day-to-day and her community building techniques that we weren’t tying it back to the housing industry. So, during our meeting the following day we made sure to revamp our pains and gains to make it relevant to our project.
We came up with a variety of pains & gains for Morning Routine, Afternoon, and Evening – the process leading us to focus on these stages. We came up with many seeds to come up with a great idea in the next phase.