Week 3 — Storyboarding

— Written by Akshat Vasavada —

After the needfinding exercise validated our ideas about the given problem, we faced the challenge of empathizing with our potential users in order to better understand what kind of solution would be best. We did this through an exercise known as storyboarding.

We began our journey into the worlds of our potential users by asking ourselves who a potential user might be. In our case, this was easy because we’d already discussed a list of potential users during needfinding. But we needed to focus on a few that we felt would be best for the initial version of the solution. We had a choice between college students, professors, married, family, single, and more (not necessarily exclusive to one category). We initially went with college students but later realized that we could expand further on the hiring front to anyone within the UCSD community and their families, meaning students and faculty. Since we wanted to be broader than just students and faculty, we decided to split students into on and off-campus (different jobs done) and young professionals in the area. We also decided to convert faculty to adults with families and decided to address issues within those families as those of parents and those of the elderly. Thus, we ended up with 5 specific groups of people that represent the 5 personas we developed. These personas were also selected because of the likelihood of these groups hiring college students to do odd jobs.

Our 5 Personas

We highlighted 6 needs

Once we had our 5 personas selected and assigned, we highlighted 6 needs (see above) we discovered from our needfinding exercise (1 exclusively for those hiring and 1 exclusively for those working) and made storyboards for them.

Here are some of the few stories we made (descriptions in captions) reflecting some of the needs our personas have that our solution addresses:

Albert is a young professional that needs a safe, reliable platform to do business on

Tiffany is a student that needs to find a photographer without wading through weeks of nonsense clutter

Bill is a student who is always low on cash and needs to find quick and easy jobs to make money from

Our storyboards focussed on various problems revolving around the same need to find someone to do a task. We hope to help college students that need money use their skills to earn it. If we’re being very optimistic, we hope it connects students to the community through their service.

Over the next few weeks, we will see this through by prototyping a solution.