Day 4 – Much ado!

Today was another intense day of discussion, confussion and creation. We started out by discussing the interviews we’d taken the day before and generated the most important insights about the users we interviewed.

A presentation about persona’s provided us with a lot of interesting ways to communicate to each other, and think about, our prospective users within the team and to the outside world. But soon after drama ensued within the team as a dramatic discussion erupted about the user data we had gathered so far and the need to find more extreme users to distill stronger insights and meaning from. This resulted into Alexandra and Alina to go out and find more extreme users while Jakob and Jan stayed behind to work with the data already available.

So the boys projected the collected user insights into the future and didn’t shy away from crazy ideas. We worked in tight timeframes to quickly generate a strong futurevision and we identified interesting design spaces for two persona’s. In this we went a bit too fast and skipped an important step. We didn’t give enough characteristics to the persona’s to treat them and think about them as real persons, this is something we will have to address soon.

The girls came back with some excellent user data that fit nicely into the extreme users category. And so the ecowarrior persona was born. Insights were gathered and a framework for the persona was designed by Alexandra and Alina, while Jakob and Jan identified some of the user need for our extreme tech persona, based on none other than mister Mallard.

We felt the importance to discuss some planning issues and the need for better structure regarding breaks and dinertimes. This is something we need to constantly keep an eye on to keep the process healthy and uplifting.

Nearing the end of the evening a dramatic miscommunication ensued about the design spaces for our extreme ecowarrior user. But after discussing this over and over again, rehashing and repeating our views on the subject (How do we create design spaces for a user that keeps away from technology and lives in a transient commune?) we were finally able to understand that we were talking about the same thing. Resolving this thankfully led to a quick analysis of this users’ needs.

We didn’t create a formal or even funny presentation for the next day to present to our peers. Rather we thought to present our ideas from our workspace to gather valuable feedback instead of entertaining our collegues. However we decided to come in a little early tomorrow to work out some of the design spaces and think about the presentation for a bit.