Throughout the project experience, my group has had a little bit of trouble keeping our original project scope in mind when we move forward with each step of the process. However, with this next stage, developing a persona and journey map helped us focus more on that original scope than in previous stages.
During the process of developing our persona, my group revisited our interviews that we conducted and the scope we created at the beginning of the semester to define who exactly is our target customer. It was useful to do this individually at first with sticky notes, because we could each contribute our ideas. Then, when we came together as a group, we could discuss the differences and similarities between the different aspects that we each came up with. By talking it out and being forced to zero in on specific characteristics our our persona, then it helped us dig deep to figure out what type of customer we’re actually focusing our project on.
After our persona was completed, we developed the journey map. We decided to use a journey map instead of an empathy map, because we felt that the former would be more pertinent to our project topic. Similar to the process we used for developing the persona, we used the individual sticky notes to generate ideas for each section of the journey map before coming together to discuss what parts actually related to our scope. This helped us see that we wanted to focus on the experience of buying a home rather than the experience after you buy a home.
Overall, I think the process of developing personas and journey maps aided in helping my group rediscover the original scope of our project. As with most projects, it’s easy to get carried away and lose sight of where you started. With personas and journey maps being located later in the project, I think it helped my group specifically to dig deep and find the true heart of our project, which sometimes gets overshadowed and overlooked.