Empathy stage
Empathizing was the first stage of our design thinking process. Our team conducted research to get a personal grasp of the users' needs. The process was efficient as our target group was readily available on campus. It was easy to obtain insights into the users' world by observing and consulting with our peers. We utilised our peers' and our own experiences to understand users' experiences, motivations, and problems.
User Persona
We created a user persona as an archetype of a user to help us empathize by understanding personal contexts. By basing personas on user research, teams can avoid the pitfalls of designing for anecdotal, "fake," or extreme users. Our user is Charlotte, a mature student with a family and a part-time job. Charlotte has a hearing impairment which can affect her access to some of the aspects of campus life. Due to her busy life and self-restricted social media use, Charlotte feels isolated and disengaged from campus life. Through Charlott's persona, we demonstrate how our solution can help the users connect with each other and with IADT.
Empathy Map
Our empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about our users. It externalizes knowledge about our users in order to create a shared understanding of their needs, and aid in decision-making. Our empathy map is based on Charlotte, and how she feels and thinks. We demonstrated her fears, such as being afraid of missing vital college information or her hopes such as the easy use of the IADThub app. Our thinking empathy journey extended to imagining Charlotte/Maria's pain points and gain points too. Charlotte is hearing impaired so her fear is that she cannot access information as well as others using the app. Her gain point is to be able to complete her degree course.
Story Board
We created a storyboard to demonstrate Maria's, our user person's, journey. The storyboard helps to visualize her journey in a specific context. The combination of images and words makes complex ideas clear.
We depicted our user person's return to college after the pandemic. Maria/Charlotte feels isolated and a bit lonely. As she is a mature student the age gap and different life experiences can make her social life within IADT a bit restricted.
Maria would like to connect to others and reaches out to Zoe. Zoe helps our user by introducing the IADThub app where our user can join a society and share good experiences with like-minded students.