Creating the personas and the journey maps for our project has played a critical role in narrowing our focus. The personas we chose represented three different groups we wanted to focus on; the married boomer, the single boomer, and our sort of anti persona the college grad. Each of these personas add an element to our “story” we are looking at addressing. We have found through this process that we are focusing on the affects of housing with the younger baby boomer generation in terms of a milestone lifestyle change (i.e. children moving out after college, divorce, etc.).
Identifying this narrowed focus helped us create a journey map. We all decided that we were still a bit broad in our focus so we decided to use a journey map to help us narrow in even further. We decided to focus on single baby boomers who recently went through at least one lifestyle change and faced with a decision on their housing future. We went through their daily routine which we hope will help us identify potential needs and opportunities within the housing market to address them.
This entire process has definitely helped us create a more focused scope of the work we are looking at and how to look and interpret the data we’ve collected in that context. We found ourselves initially trying to solve a macro problem in the sense that we wanted to capture the entirety of their home and family life. The pinnacle being that lifestyle change with maybe an empty nest or spouse leaving and then how that affects their choices in homes as they near retirement. Our narrowed in focus now only looks at the latter half of their housing in the sense that the lifestyle change has happened and what can they do now as they are faced with retirement and empty houses. I am looking forward to completing the design process and working on the creation phase using the data we have and the updated focus.