MidLife Crisis?
Creating a persona for a life I haven’t lived
As I continue to update my blogs, i’ve found myself struggling to not feel silly about what I write about. Randomly recording information about a class project and unpacking my thought process on a public forum has becoming something I’ve found somewhat difficult to work up to completing. Keeping this in mind, please bear with me as I navigate both personal voice and organization when it comes to these blog posts.
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This week in entrepreneurial design, we took the base ideas imputed with happy bob the empathy map and created our own, realistic “customers”, or rather people that suffer from the job to be done that we came up with a couple classes ag. For reference, this job to be done that my group settled on was to “To create a more confident Texas State Alumni”
I actually really enjoyed this process because I got to see each of my team members inject small bits of their personal experience into each of their personas. We decided that the best way to begin was to figure out the range of people we were catering to. Are they young? Old? How are they affiliated with Texas State University? And so forth. We came up with 5 different categories, each pertaining to the graduation date of the persona. We had a high school student, who is committed to Texas State, but not yet a freshman, a newly admitted freshman, a student close to graduation, a long since graduated alumni and the mother of a new freshman. We divided each of these categories up by team member so that we could create an in depth caricature of each of them, which gave us a way to visualize who exactly we’re trying to help/gather information from.
I chose to take a deeper look into the personality of an Alumni. While I can say i’ve really only met a small handful of Texas State Alumni (as in two) I did my best to create a very specfic, nostalgia driven persona. I felt that Sherri probably misses her days at Texas State, and that she's afraid of falling behind or becoming irrelevant in her field of work because I felt that I would feel that way after graduating from texas State. Many industries are developing much faster than they used to because of the speed of content conspumtion on apps like tiktok and instagram, which generate very real trends and revenue. In an effort to balance both being a present mother and an effective manager, I felt that Sherri probably longs for simpler, more hopeful times when she had a more clear cut path and time to work on herself. This of course is not based on anyone that I know, but more inspired by what I feel could very well happen to myself. In creating this caricature of Sheri however, I began to struggle to see how exactly she would fit in to our job to be done. It seems she is already a proud Texas State alumn, but that rather she feels disconnected from her time at college. I elected to continue to contribute to Sherri’s caricature, but if I end up realizing that she is not quite who we are targeting, then she will be added to the list of creative mistakes made along the way to finding a solution. That being said, I am a little attatched to Sherri, I identify with her struggle to find a specific path to follow and her fear of irrelevency. I hope that she finds peace in her future, perhaps by finding a forum in which she can reconnect with Texas State students and offer advice to new and prospective students!
That being said, I am always appreciative of the creative process, and am excited to see where this project, and especially upcoming ideation and research takes Sherri and I.
