Final Thoughts and Reflections

Creating and designing a new product from the ground up was a completely new experience for me. From receiving our room assignment, to creating a persona, to designing and altering a prototype, I learned so much about retrieving customer insights and creating valuable experiences. In particular, since I am an accounting major rather than marketing major, this was my first experience with many of the concepts discussed in Professor Walls’ lectures. The first main idea from the course that was of value for me was the concept of creating a persona and deriving a target market through segmentation. When analyzing segmentation techniques, we decided to take a step beyond the traditional segmentation and target individual consumers’ needs by designing a bath-time product that would appeal to our target markets’ functional, esteem, and pleasure needs. We chose to create a very specific age group for our persona, children between the ages of four to six. We chose this group by following the tips Professor Walls gave for choosing a segment, especially to not be constrained by traditional segmentation (which we thought would be people our ages or our parents’ ages, people we’re more familiar with. This segment was a challenge for us because not only did we have to create value for the children, but we also had to create value and gather insights about their parents, the people who would actually be purchasing the products. Once we determined our segment, however, the fun part was creating the persona for our 4-6 year old. Designing a personality, name, lifestyle, and attitude for the child was very interesting and definitely helped when designing the product.

The second concept that was new and of value to me was learning about different research methods and what the best methods were when trying to learn particular insights. Since bath-time is a private subject for most people, we weren’t sure which methods to use at first. After listening to Kate Canales’ presentation though, we decided the best method to use would be an in-house observation for our subject. This would be a great method because as Kate said, it is often difficult to see the true-life scenarios without people altering their realities. By being able to actually observe a bath-time for our age group, we were able to experience the chaos that was involved, without the mom being able to sugar coat it at all. The insights we gained from our research helped us create the design for our prototype. As Kate said, “design is a human-centered problem solving approach.” By observing a bath-time we were able to realize that the main problems both the kids and the parents were having was the kids were easily bored, which would lead to chaos and mess. From this research, we designed our product to solve this boredom problem and create valuable entertainment for children that was both educational and allowed the parents to have the productivity time that they desired. Besides getting ideas for how to utilize different research methods, the main takeaways from Kate’s presentation were her four tips for doing this work well: 1) Get out there, 2) Question your assumptions (and suspend judgment), 3) Realize today’s behaviors predict future behaviors, and 4) Value stories as data.

Overall, I think the main reason that this project was interesting to me was because we were able to design the prototype from scratch, and experience all of the difficulties and triumphs along the way. One of the most obvious dilemmas we had in our group was that we fell subject to groupthink. We came up with our first product design and prototype fairly quickly, and we all agreed to it simultaneously. No one questioned why we designed the product the way we did, or what the actual benefits were to our creation and if we could improve the product at all. However, after we received our first round of feedback from showing the prototype, one of our group members finally played the role of devils advocate. We asked the question, “why do we even have this feature?” to the group, and after no one could give an insightful answer, we decided to change the product entirely. What we came up with was a much more practical solution and greatly enhanced our project. Along with the feedback we got from our prototype from potential users, the feedback we got from Professor Walls was part of the triumph we experienced throughout the process. His feedback was positive and he gave constructive criticism. His ideas helped us know that we were on the right track, and actually were creating a good project. Finally, without a doubt I know that working with a group on this project contributed to my learning throughout the semester. I appreciated that this was a semester long project and the groups were chosen randomly because I was able to work with all marketing majors that had much more experience with the material than I did. Our group had an excellent dynamic throughout the design process and we were all very supportive of each others’ ideas and contributions to the project. I feel like each group member brought something different to the table and enhanced the end result. In sum, I greatly enjoyed this project, occasional frustrations and all, and I feel that it has been of great value to me.