Blog 8: The Finale

Design Thinking for Business Innovation is an intensive class. Not that we were given an insane amount of work, but that the entire course was jammed full with useful and practical marketing concepts. Overall the group project definitely helped me understand visualization. The visual aspect of marketing is just as important as the ideas that go into a concept. I learned that instead of describing something in detail, a mock up or prototype can be so much more effective at conveying an idea and finding improvements. In our group, we created in app for Target and subsequently, a prototype of the app. I was in awe of how beneficial having a visual representation of our idea helped our group come up with more features. 

A prototype for my group's project

Not only did I learn from the project about visualization, but also from in class activities and other blog posts. Professor Walls incorporated visualization into every aspect of the class.

A previous visualization project

It seems that at every turn, we were forced to think outside of just words.

Although it caused much frustration and a lot of questions, the empathy phase is something that I now understand. Creating a persona was a method I had no understanding of at the beginning of this course.  I had never tried to create a person from basically scratch and then contemplate how they act and feel. At times it seemed kind of crazy! 

Our persona's Facebook page

Now I know, craziness aside, creating a persona allows for marketers to get inside the head of the consumers and determine their overall wants, needs, and thoughts. Also, the persona was a great starting point to our research and really narrowed down what my group needed to find out more about. Without our persona Allie, I’m sure my group and I would have been overwhelmed with the concept of millennials and would have not gotten to the meat of the project. To me, empathy always seemed like a “hot topic” in marketing, something you want to achieve; though even my best guesses never got me empathizing with my customer. This class provided me with a step by step process on how to empathize with the target market and for that, I am grateful!

At times while working on the project I thought, “why are we even doing this??” However, taking a step back and viewing the process as a whole, I cannot say there wasn’t a useful part of the project. Each phase provided an important aspect to the overall completion of my group’s project. I can say that I do wish the timing for some phases was different. Specifically, I felt we spent a lot of time on the persona, but very little on the prototype. I do not think a month was needed to complete the interviewing. Instead, an extra week on the prototype phase would have been more beneficial to our finished product.

This semester long project has been a rollercoaster of doubts, questions, frustrations, and successes.

The beginning phases caused me to feel lost in the dark. I felt like we were given very little instruction and I felt unclear on the purpose of some objectives.  Once everything started falling into place and the “oh that’s why we did it” epiphanies stated occurring, the project and my team became more enjoyable. Professor Walls was a great sounding board through our project hiccups. Always providing us with a cryptic (but useful) answers. I believe that you can learn a lot from working with other people ( God knows we do a lot of that in the business school!) and with this project being no exception. I must say this was one of the happiest and funniest groups I have been in! They made the long hours in the Reliant Productivity Center bearable. Plus when I was confused about a topic, a group member would help me understand and provide their own personal insight. The project was very much a conglomerate of learning from the professor, the TA, my fellow classmates, and my group members.