Blog 2

The concept of creating a persona for product development and marketing purposes is new to me. I had never thought about creating a detailed persona for which to target my products or services. As Kate Canales explained in class, design should be human centered. If you keep your target customer in mind while creating your product, it is more likely to be useful to your customer and tap into their deeper needs. Kate explained how Maybelline was originally not creating products that were catching on with older women who were concerned with aging. This segment thought of Maybelline as a company that was catered to younger women and therefore not suited to meet their needs. I saw how by creating a persona of this older woman they could better understand this group and more capable to create a product that suited their needs. They also used information gathered from this persona to cater their advertising campaign so that it resonated with women in this age group. 

If you can gain deep insights about your customer, you can find how to design your product in a way that meets the obvious and unspoken needs of the customer. By uncovering truths and behaviors of the people you are trying to serve, you can find ways to design your product so that it does the most good for this target market. Now that I have seen the in-class presentation and done a few readings on the subject I can see how this could be a useful tool. As you can imagine, creating personas could be a valuable resource for helping create products that really benefit the final consumer.

There is a process to creating a persona. The stages of persona development include family planning, conception and gestation, birth and maturation, adulthood, and lifetime achievement and retirement. Creating a persona using these steps helps develop a persona in a way that mimics the human life cycle. When you develop a persona you gather information that helps you to draw conclusions and better understand the behaviors of a certain group of people.

If a marketer was to create a persona of a college student, it could help them to develop products and services that would better meet the specific needs of this market. If a marketer were to create a persona of myself, it might read something like this…

Paige Phillips is a senior college student at the University of Texas. She is 21 years old, female, and Caucasian. She is studying business and has a desire to be successful in whatever she does. She enjoys learning and understanding how her world works. Whenever she has a question, she looks it up right away using her iPhone. She is in her final year of college and uncertain of what her future holds. This uncertainty is a cause of concern to her.

Although she wants to be successful and well educated, she also is concerned with having fun and being able to relax. Paige often has difficulty with time management and is often putting things off until the last minute. This has led her to appreciate not being rushed and being able to work at her own pace. She enjoys spending time with others and having a wide variety of experiences. She is willing to try anything once. She is independent and likes to think for herself this enables her to go and do things on her own. She came to the college without knowing anyone else. She easily adapts to her environment and likes to feel in control of her life. Paige is more of a night owl and enjoys late nights, and is not fond of early mornings. She also enjoys having the latest technology and gadgets. She likes attending sporting events and having a team to cheer for. Her favorite games to watch are Texas Longhorn football games. What she enjoys about these games are the energy and sense of community that a common sports team can bring. 

Her lifestyle is somewhat fast paced. She always likes to be doing something and not idling. She is enthusiastic about music and films. Paige also enjoys spending time outside. She likes being outdoors for relaxation and for exercise. For physical fitness, she would rather play golf or tennis than workout in a gym. Like many people her age, she is concerned with appearances and making good impressions. This is her motivation to go shopping and to invest more money in services such as haircuts. She likes to buy products she can feel good about. She likes to feel she has bought something that is well made and that she can get excited about using.

Using this quick description of Paige, marketers could uncover deeper insights about her. They can use the information they gathered about her behavior and lifestyle to develop a product that will suit her needs and others like her. By creating a product with a persona in mind, it can help create innovative products that are human centered. This can lead to a more successful product and an ability to improve design in a way that can better the lives of its consumers. 

Blog 1

I found several things interesting in our class lecture on design philosophy. I thought the idea to design for the other 90% of society was interesting. I feel that often we neglect to think of the rest of society and only create products for a certain category of customers. I thought a good example of a product created for the other 90% was the rolling water tank. This water tank helped to solve a problem that many people were experiencing everyday. Now with this tank water can be more easily transported to and from the home. Designs such as these are improving the quality of life for many people and solving important problems of the other 90%. I also thought the philosophy of designing the system was interesting. Rather than just creating products, it can be beneficial to design new systems and programs to serve the customer. As was discussed in class, cars have been designed and produced for years. Yet, the concept of renting a car for a short term is a new idea that had never been tapped into. This idea has been turned into a program where people can register for the program and conveniently rent cars as they need them. This shows how designing a system can be helpful for the customer.

One thing that I found somewhat misleading was the philosophy to design for simplicity. In lecture, it was said that it is better to have a product do one thing well than many things OK. I believe that a product can be multifunctional and remain beneficial to the customer. There are many examples of such a product, such as the iPhone. Before the innovative iPhone people only thought of cell phones as that – phones. Now however, we see that a phone can successfully include many functions in a way that to the benefit of the customer. However, I do agree that including too many functions in a single product can lead to confusion and deterioration of product quality.

I think the new line of bottled water, H2Orange, is a creative design concept. The bottle is shaped like the famous UT tower and has text in burnt orange. The design of this water bottle is innovative in that it took an ordinary product, the water bottle, and turned it into something that people can get excited about. This product will appeal to students, faculty, alumni, and supporters of the University of Texas – Austin. Another thing I like about this new product is that a portion of the profits goes toward funding scholarships. It is a product that the customer can feel good about buying. The customer can feel they are supporting their school while funding scholarships.

            This water bottle seems to correspond to many of Dieter Rams principals of good design. H2Orange obviously meets the principal that good design is aesthetic. The tower shaped water bottle is attractive and draws the eye. H2Orange also meets Rams principal that good design helps us to understand a product. The design of this water bottle helps the customer realize that the water bottle is affiliated with the University of Texas. The customer then realizes by purchasing this product, they are supporting the university and a scholarship fund. I also feel this water bottle meets Rams principal that good design is innovative. I feel H2Orange is a new and original concept. This is my first time to see a water bottle with such a complicated design. I have also never seen a university create a water bottle resembling their famous landmark. I feel that since this product design is so new that it will draw interest from customers.