Figuring Out Next Steps When Things Aren’t Clear
Although we experienced a heat wave this week, the time passed by surprisingly fast. I avoided going outside during the day time from Tuesday to Thursday, so I’d call it a successful week.
This week we began to fully synthesize the interviews and pull out insights from each sketch. These eventually turned into 6 hypotheses.
Figuring out the 6 hypotheses took a bit of time, because there were so many differing view points on aspects of the sketches.
Overall in the interviews, people liked Happy Place and Disappearing Journal the most (or had the most positive views of all the sketches).
The interesting aspects of each one was the:
1. Ability to reflect in a productive manner
2. Letting thoughts go, and reducing the stigma of talking about mental health issues
3. Being able to feel more connected
Decision Time
We decided that the project was at a point where we could take a leap of faith and decide the direction of the project before our next set of interviews.
We went with Disappearing Journal as the project we would build on top of and pursue further. This seemed the most interesting and the most useful for the people we are building for.
Happy Place was very promising, but there were many aspects of it that felt like it had been implemented (or could easily be implemented) by existing discovery platforms.
Building Out a Plan
We spent a few hours thinking about what ideas for each aspect of Disappearing Journal that we could pursue. We didn’t want to leave anything out (shoutout to Sherry for leading this session) and whiteboarding this was incredibly helpful.
Dev-ing a Lil’
I played around with a few IBM Watson API’s. Loved using the Personality Insights API, incredibly fun to use and see what insights I could gather from tweet mashups.
I’m having a lot of fun looking at different React Native projects so far, a lot of cool things created by incredibly smart people!
Professional Development
Being a woman in tech is hard and it was really valuable to hear from Christine and Leslie on managing my professional goals and what to watch out for in the industry.
Made by Many in New York is a very casual work place and my past internships/jobs have been as informal, if not more so, but I’ve always had doubts on how I should act and how I should dress. I’ve almost always thought, “Is what I’m wearing appropriate, too casual, too formal? What kind of persona do I give out? Will people judge me?”.
For a time when I was interviewing, I consciously wore all black. Every. Single. Interview. Black turtle neck, black jeans, and black boots. I laugh thinking how funny I must have looked.
Imagine — it’s spring in San Francisco, 80 degrees out, and there I was, head to toe in black.
Maybe that was a bit too much. I didn’t get a single offer from my all black interviewing phase. It was a combination of many things, but since then I’ve sworn to never wear all black to an onsite.
Until next week! Get ready for more insights, personal anecdotes, and project updates :).
