One of the first steps in designing a meaningful product is really knowing who you’re designing for.  Our trip to Myanmar enabled us get in touch with our user–to talk with rural families, to gain insight about their cooking habits, and to understand what’s important to them (and what’s not).  We gathered an incredible amount of information–notes, pictures, videos, stories, and memories–but when we got home, it was easy to feel lost in all of it.  We immediately thought to ourselves:     

How do we organize all of this stuff?

How do we make sense of it all?

How do we create a coherent story?

“Get it out and get it visual” was our mantra.  We put everything on post-its and up on a whiteboard–a process we like to call “space saturation” at the d.school.  Going through this process helped us revisit our material and create a visual environment where we could immerse ourselves in our findings.  From there, we grouped information into categories like “safety,” “deforestation,” “transportation,” and “prices,” sometimes creating duplicates for facts, observations, and thoughts that fit into multiple categories.  After a few hours, we were ready to start characterizing our user.  Specifically, we were instructed to develop a customer point of view, a concise statement that describes our user, the need, and the insight supporting that need.  After lots of revisions, we came up with this:

A risk-averse, rural woman living on less than $2 a day needs a safer and more fuel-efficient method of cooking to combat the rising cost and shortage of firewood.

A concise point of view has been a great way for us to keep our design (and us) focused on the person that really matters.  It has also served as a basis for brainstorming potential solutions (i.e. “how can we make our stove safer?”) and for evaluating our competing ideas.  Finally, it has helped us communicate why what we’re doing is so important–to rally people around the user we’re designing for and the need we’re working to address.

In a future blog post (What our user cares about), we’ll share the thinking that went into its creation.