Too early to panic but too late to relax

By Júlia Racskó February 27, 2017 Edition CHIP 2016-2017Discover ShuQi project

You know the feeling when you start to dig into a project and what once seemed too big to handle becomes reasonable? Well, this is not how I feel now.

Last week for me was about creating personas – characters that we keep in mind while designing. This way each interaction already falls into some context and we can see further than the next screen, so it is a really important tool. In order to have a proper foundation I set out to do interviews with average and extreme possible users, which has taught me a lot. Almost everyone was extreme and weird in some ways, the seemingly calm and collected person has neuroses about packing, my most disorganised friend actually doesn’t stress about their bags’s content and has a routine, just less obviously than the person who has a daily list for more challenging periods of life.

Some people are motivated by fear while some take a more positive outlook on the problem or just want to be more efficient without any emotional energy invested.

I have also never thought about some people moving between so many locations within the same day: what about the textbook needed two days from now on while tonight they are staying at their partner’s place? Also there are connected groups of objects: people rarely forget their laptop, but the charger is often forgotten, and usually not at home. And what about when people are returning from the office or a vacation? Did they leave something in the drawer?

As you can guess, the work doesn’t end here. The first interviewees were the first responders to my plea of help, friends and acquaintances, and I have to widen the circle in age and profession to find eager but undiscovered possible use cases for our object tracking system and not collapse under the already collected ones. I have started to group and mix traits of the people I have so far met so the personas can be born. In the forthcoming period I plan to refine the traits of Anna, Marina and Tom, while hopefully identifying a few more.