Need, Context, Channels and Factors

This week, in thesis workshop, I collaborated with two classmates to analyze and understand the needs of our theses' audience, the context, where these needs are observed within certain boundaries, channels that could enable us to reach out the audience to meet their needs and factors that need to be considered. We worked with sticky notes to put our suggestions on each others' maps and it was very helpful to collaborate since it allows you to look at your thesis from different perspectives. 

We began with choosing the persona to work with. For my topic, it was caregiver. Then, we had a conversation on the needs of caregiver. The consensus was that caregiver needs to communicate with the patient effectively so that they can be more helpful for each other. We looked at these needs in the context of hospital care and home care, by considering the caregiver as a close relative of patient or the significant other. The channels to improve communication skills of caregiver could be reaching them in person with social workers, providing them with mobile apps, courses, smart wearables that embody emotional sensors. Some factors we took into consideration were that a caregiver is usually exhausted and couldn't manage any experience with high friction. In other words, the experience should not require complicated processes to learn how to interact with it. It should be affordable, because cancer patients and their families already spend lots of money during this process. It should not be time consuming, because caregivers and patients are usually very busy with hospital visits and treatment processes.

Overall, this exercise was very insightful to analyse a topic carefully, through different lenses.