Group ideation from brainstorming and persona creation

On Thursday 18.2. we had our first interview with one of Solita's employee. Interview went well and we got great insights and more understanding of the organization culture and employee processes and views. In the following interviews we are looking for to dig in more deeply to Solita’s project practices within the project and get to know the tools and ways that are used in now to ensure the availability of information and knowledge. Totally we will have four interviews that will be hold on 24.2. and 26.2. Interviewees have been selected by Solita with their best knowledge who would be the most significant people to be interviewed. Before the interviews we didn't have any more information than the names and titles of the interviewees.

Based on our first interview and insights that we got from Thursdays interview, we can create persona that is representing typical employee working in Solita’s projects – persona isn’t a real employee but they are based on data from interview(s). Personas can help to define and understand the employees’ -but also projects’ - needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Personas are handy to help the designs, guide ideation processes and focus on creating user experience. (Dam & Siang 2021) Persona can lead us to formulate our questions in a better format so that we could get more insights and necessary data from focus groups (or upcoming interviews).

Personas can be approached from different perspectives – goal-directed, role-based, engaging and fictional personas (Dam & Siang 2021). From the point of view of boosting knowledge sharing in projects, we ended up choosing role-based persona that focuses on job tasks and processes. Persona consist of name, photo, job title, goals and needs, behaviors and beliefs and characteristics aka attributes (Cao 2016).

In the picture below we have created persona for typical development projects:

In the fourth workshop our main goal was to brainstorm ideas on our own and together. Firstly we started with POV (Point of View) task where we needed to think our project aim and its needs and reasons behind the needs. We came up with Point of View state that was “project employee needs to find easily tips and have the ability to share knowledge because projects share same processes and information needs”. The next step was to brainstorm independently ideas related to our project – totally we got 18 ideas that were different from each other. After solo brainstorming we discussed and explained our ideas to the whole team. The fourth step was to work with our team and discuss our results – then we categorized our ideas by separating them by topics and combined similar ones. At the beginning the POV seemed to be the hardest part because formulating needs into a one sentence isn’t that easy. The start of the brainstorming was a bit rocky but after a couple of minutes, we got the first ideas and then it really started to happen.

We agreed that brainstorming together as a team worked best for us – we brainstormed some ideas on our own, but we got so much more by discussing and creating ideas influenced by another ideas.  We categorized our ideas into four groups – rewards and considerations, organizational behavior and culture, documentation and team and project practices. We selected four best ideas to be possible action points in our project. Ideation affected our development process significantly in a positive way because we truly needed that brainstorming and putting all our thoughts together creating insightful ideas. Brainstorming came at a good time and we think that we will use it again after all the interviews are done.

The most “lovable” idea is to give chocolate as a public recognition or reward – for example chocolate could be given from team member to another as a thank you his/her help in e.g. information sharing. Chocolate would be nice recognition of good work (given from the Solita or co-worker) that could boost motivation, create stronger group-spirit and communality but woudn't be too expensive or too resource intensive. The most useful idea is to have “check-point” internal meetings in projects to make sure that team members know the situations, responsibilities, roles, etc. This way the team spirit would improve but the problem is that the impact on knowledge sharing isn’t clear and direct and it will depend on the individuals. The most difficult idea is to implement and take into use are organizational and cultural changes in attitudes and behavior related to understanding and knowledge sharing. This is a long-term solution and will create common ways of working – the downside is the huge effort that this idea would need. The most efficient idea is to create team or/and unit rewarding – this could happen after the project is closed or monthly depending on the duration of projects.

Our team members’ have all been involved actively – we have together searched interview dates and done our first interview. Interview questions were also formed and designed together in the meeting. The next three interviews will take place on week 8 and we will all participate and equally share responsibilities according to writing notes and being interviewers.

Waiting for spring,

KBD 💛

 

References:

Cao, J. (2016). The UX Designer’s Guide to Learn User Personas. Studio by UXPin. Available at: https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/ux-designers-5-minute-guide-lean-personas/ (read 20.2.2021)

Dam, R. & Siang, T. (2021). Personas – A Simple Introduction. Interaction of Design Foundation. Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them (read 20.2.2021)