Proj 1 — New Dog Owner Navigating a City’s Public Park System
Week 4 (2/23—2/25)
This being my final week, has been a refreshing first taste at the design process. It has been a unique experience for me given that I have never had before. In this final week, we mainly focused on improving our slides and fleshing out our pieces. As I mentioned before, I didn’t have too much to tweak prior to our meeting but we spent our wednesday going through a dry run and practicing our pitches. It came out well and we felt confident going into our presentation.
On the day of the presentation, I personally enjoyed the experience and felt grateful for the advice given to us. I specifically remember the feedback Anne gave us on a different persona worth mentioning that we didn’t consider which was people who didn’t enjoy dogs at the park. Going onwards, I plan on adding that persona into our slides and transition that over into our paper. But given that project 1 is coming to an end, I am glad I was able to learn a lot from this experience about the process and appreciate the many little lessons I’ve picked up along the way.
Week 3 (2/16–2/18)
We came into Tuesday ready for our first presentation and a round of feedback. I focused on the Personas section for our presentation so I fleshed out our written up personas and narrowed it down into 3 bullet points for different slides. During class, we gave our first run on the presentation and it came out really great. I appreciated the feedback given, especially when it came to the minor details of fleshing out our solutions slide and finding ways to effectively bring our time down so it wasn’t too long. Nevertheless, I was moving forward with cleaning up my persona slide a bit by adding key quotes in my script that would embody the different pain points stakeholders deal with. I’m planning on spending the rest of the weekend cleaning up and focusing on presenting for the most part.
Week 2 (2/09–2/11)
This week, we began to expand more on our project and began to use tactics to flesh out our problem space and streamline our ideas. As group, we took the time last weekend to observe and begin researching into dog owners/their various stakeholding counterparts and tried to understand any pain points as well as motivations for them. My initial focus was to learn about the safety of dogs as a problem space to dive into but I soon realized that it would be a more interesting take to learn about the social dynamics for dog owners, especially between dogs. In addition, we worked on empathy maps and stakeholder maps to better grasp the problem at hand. I focused on personas with Tim while Lexie and Lee worked on our empathy maps.
For the personas, the focus was to cover the variety of different stakeholders that different users might connect with to understand the various motivations and fears dog owners might have when it comes to navigating public parks. In addition we also started mapping our problem space as seen below.
Overall, it was a successful second week and I am excited to see where this project leads.
Week 1 (02/02 - 02/04)
For Project 1, my group is focusing on new dog owners and the difficulties of navigating city parks. Over the past week, we’ve discussed and researched potential issues for dog owners, as well as setting up preliminary boundaries to define the scope of our problem. As a group, we chose to focus on different areas within our topic to research into to capture a cohesive view on this project. The problem space I chose to focus on was Safety in regards to dog owner’s concerns with bringing their dog to a new environment. Through secondary research and reflection on my experiences, Dog Parks has some potential concerns that may discourage people from going to them and I felt it is important to explore topics like interactions with other dogs/social issues, physical items that could potential harm dogs, and others. With this, I wanted to use surveys/interviews as my research method with some observational work to sort out the questions I should ask because I think the perspectives of dog owners can be so varied. Going forward for this weekend, I plan on heading to a park and see what potential questions should be addressed and draft up an initial list of questions to ask.