Ideation Workshop & Defining Personas
Social Impact Project on the Homeless
Over the last couple of weeks, we conducted secondary research and primary research on homelessness. We came across insights on the effects of homelessness and what aids currently exist. Now our group wanted to start to move to ideation stages and really narrow in on primary and secondary personas.
Our first step was to do a brainstorming exercise, by grouping themes together.
Then we gathered together for an ideation workshop to help explore future solutions. We did a brainstorming exercise using the How Might We structure to come up with as many ideas as possible.
Some of the ideas we came up with were..
How might we help the homeless trust the government?
How might we encourage people to donate the homeless?
How might we change the perception towards homeless people?
How might we create empathy towards the homeless?
From here we all decided to choose the six ideas we were drawn to expand furthermore on. Below are the six that we thought might be good to explore.
From there we moved on to vote on the ideas we liked the best. From doing our primary and secondary research we realized that the homeless have trouble getting jobs so we wanted to focus on that area along with an element of people feeling unsafe donating to the homeless. Even I myself for this project, felt a little uneasy having to go talk to homeless people for an interview. Lastly we also wanted to focus on an element to encourage others to donate to the homeless as well and create a safe space for it.
From there, we went on to think about 5 main ideas, being:
- QR scan stickers (like PayRange app) + Social media pages focusing on the homeless
2. A job board dedicated to helping convicted homeless and regular homeless get jobs
3. Easier access to vocational training and education
4. Partner with restaurants/grocery stores to donate unused food
5. Incentives to donate (tax benefits)
We came together as a group once again, to vote on the ideas that we loved. We ended up loving the QR scan idea and tax benefits from donating which we thought could be good to combine with one another. Creating two personas one being the homeless person and one being a donor.
For our primary persona, we decided to focus on the donor itself — because that will be someone who we are trying to get to feel to donate to the homeless person itself.
Meet Carla!
Here a day in Carla’s Life:
For our secondary persona we have focused on the homeless person and pulled in the research we found around the issues they face such as depression, getting rejected from jobs because of DUI, and having family issues.
Meet Ashley!
Here a day in Ashley’s Life:
Lastly, we created a storyboard to help us really understand the scenario that this product/app would live within.
Final Thoughts
I learned a lot from the last couple of weeks and even coming to the ideation stages, I’m proud of the idea we’ve come up with and excited to see this app and idea come to life.