Round 2 Regroup: Needs and POVs

In general, I think that getting a strong POV is one of the most important parts of the design process, and it guides a group through the rest of the process.  

I wasn't satisfied with my group's POV.  There were a few main problems that we had:

1. We wanted the user in our POV to be S because we had gotten to know him best, but most of the needs that we identified were related to the other users that we shadowed.
2. We identified that S was a humble servant-leader (which is true) early on, and we would use that as the adjectives for our user in practically every POV we came up with even when neither of those traits were relevant to the need.
3. We brainstormed user traits, needs, and insights separately and then created a POV by taking components from each, even though they didn't relate to each other.

Some of our early POVs were:

• A servant leader responsible for millions of lights needs a way to create and share institutional knowledge in order to support top notch education and research.
• A servant leader with competing priorities and demands on his time needs a way to provide for his family's needs because he doesn't settle; he aspires.
• A servant leader and caretaker of a legacy needs a way to deliver the level of service that Stanford deserves and requires because he is eager to support the university that he loves.

I tried to suggest something that I thought was more cohesive, but I couldn't convince my group:

• A leader who feels responsible for his employees needs a way to create and share institutional knowledge because his employees spend more time finding the right information than they do fixing problems.

We had a subsequent meeting where we still worked on POVs.  At this meeting, I broke down our needs into people needing to help themselves (overworked, need to delegate better), people needing to help their families (on call interrupting important family events), and people needing to help Stanford (can't find the breaker rooms or other job-related needs).  We agreed that we wanted to focus on the job related needs.  We didn't come out of this meeting with a great POV, but we came up with some ideas to address job related needs (mostly involving maps).

As such, we went on to ideating solutions and prototyping before we had an agreed-upon and compelling POV.  After deciding on our final prototype, we came up with a POV that fit it:

• A humble electrical expert who never complains about a job but wishes he could spend more of his time serving the Stanford community needs a way to navigate the ever-changing wiring because he spends more time searching for the right room than using his technical skills to fix the problem