Week 4: Context Research

We started this week feeling unconfident about the need we chose- reducing stress while driving, because it was almost identical to a different team’s need (road rage). We decided that our persona would be a parent, because we saw in previous interviews that parents were a lot more stressed when they had car rides with their kids in the car, but still felt a bit undecided.

This week we learned about context research, which is the process of observing your potential users, to learn more about their problem. My favorite example from the lecture was about cracking the reason why people say that they love avocado, but they don’t buy a lot of avocados, even after the prices were lowered- after some research was done, it turns out that when at the supermarket, it’s difficult for them to tell what avocados are ripe! So when the store put up a section of ripe avocados and labeled them as “ready for today”, they avocados sale went up!

After the lecture we talked with Noa and then with Dana, we came up with a more defined need- “reducing negative emotions between parent and child during car drives”. None of us in the group are parents yet, so we have a lot to learn about parent – child interaction during car drives… so it’s good that we’re doing observations this week!

For our context research, we joined 3 parents while driving their kids to kindergarten / daycare- here's me taking notes in the front sit:

Some of the parents had quiet drives- apparently the kids keep quiet of you give them food for the ride! but some of the kids were too young for that and when an infant cries in the car, the parent had to accommodate the child while driving. In another case, the children are high energy, which had the parent distracted at times.

We also noticed that getting the kids in and out of the car takes a lot of time, and taking the kids out is especially meaningful, because parents want to leave their kids with a good mood to start their day.

In conclusion- you can't stop being a parent even while you're driving, and our team hopes we can find a way to help parents in that situation.

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