Last reflection – blog 6

In this last blog, I would like to reflect about on the Insight/Experience Audit & Prototype group project talking about two concepts that have helped me to have a better understanding of the project. Finally, I will explain my emotional reaction while I was working on it and after taking the results.

First off, Persona will be the first concept that I want to explain because of the importance of it in our project. Persona is a process in which you collect all the data you gathered from the demographic, behavioral and psychographic segmentation. As a marketer researcher you should identify roles, goals and segment factors. You must create this persona as if you are creating a real character for a movie, book etc…so It must define the needs, desires, fears, hopes, the personality traits and the lifestyle characteristics of this persona. After the segmentation this is the first step you have to carry out. It is utterly important to define the target. It must be careful in this point of your process because if you do not create an accurate persona the rest of you research may be useless. In our case, we had to study the home-office, so we decided to create Monica as a persona of our target “Do It All Moms”. A woman that lives in urban or suburban areas and is married with a husband that works outside the home and with 2 or 3 children. She is more or less 35 and with a median income of $70,000. They are successful and professional moms that prefer to work at home in order to look after their children. This persona helped me to understand which target we needed to address and what we needed to look for in our target. Having an accurate persona was useful for us to do the rest of the study.

The second concept that helped us to gain real insights was The Photo Journal. After studying some marketing courses in Spain, here it was the first time that I studied and I found really interesting in order to look for common insights. As a qualitative research technique means to involve people to express their opinions, thoughts and attitudes. These ones you could find difficult to take out from a survey or interview. People have to involve physically in the project and the real problem is that it is time-consuming so it may be difficult to find people disposed to participate. The instructions for participants must be really clear. The process bases on some specific questions you request your target answer through photos with a brief explanation about why you took that specific photo and what this supposes to you. In our research, it was the key to achieve our final prototype. Although our target is quite heterogeneous, from the photo journal we found some insights. Almost all our “moms” like to work in different parts of the house and they like to do a “to-do-list”. These insights were the key to create the portable home-office table.

Lastly, I would like to comment the emotional reactions I had working in this project. From all the groups that I had in this fall semester, exactly 4, this has been the best. All of us were different and with different cultures but we understood each other perfectly. We did not have any problems to arrange meetings and furthermore we spent a great time together, even we met to go out together. All of us we contributed in the same way to the project. Professor Walls has helped us to improve our analysis and study. He has been really receptive, overall when we decided to go to his office to have feedback of our grades. However, sometimes the feedback was a little bit confused, above all with the design of the slides. This project and overall my teammates have contributed to my learning and enjoyment in Texas. With the different cultures, the different ways of working and doing research now I have an open mind. This has been contributed to my great and unique experience in Austin.