Week 4: How might we?!

This week we were asked to define the “persona” of our typical users. This persona should help us understand our users key traits, behaviors, goals, responsibilities, and needs that relate to our domain - romantic relationship.

While we were analyzing the interviews of the experts and the end-users we noticed a common recurring problem; Couples are struggling to have meaningful communication in day to day life - especially when they are both busy. Poor communication is one of the most common reasons that relationships end as reported in scientific reports (Field et al., 2010).

Don’t get us wrong - the main problem isn't finding time together. It's that people usually don't stop their daily routine to have deep conversations with their partner, even when they are physically together.

After the work we did in class we met on Wednesday at Maya’s house. She was obviously an amazing host.

We worked hard on building a persona that correctly describes the needs and wants of our end-users. The persona we built is a young couple (25 & 28) who have been dating for at least a year. Each person in the relationship has his own needs but eventually as a couple they have a lot of common needs like: need for honest open conversations, need of feeling loved and seen, need of having unique experiences together, and need of maximizing their time together.

In addition, after a lot of thinking and debating we were able to distill our problem into an exact “How Might We” question format: HOW MIGHT WE HELP YOUNG COUPLES, THAT ARE IN RELATIONSHIP FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, USE THEIR TIME TOGETHER FOR GETTING A STRONGER CONNECTION IN DAY TO DAY LIFE.

After we had our persona, it’s needs and the “How Might We” question ready, we started working on our presentation that will present all the research and conclusions we had so far.

In our project, we chose to focus on “How to make good things better” and not on how to “make a horrible situation a bit better”.

We chose to help couples improve their existing friendship and communication - instead of making something new from scratch.

It took positive psychology a long time to have its own respect in the scientific world.

We also feel that our main challenge is to convince everyone that the lack of healthy communication in romantic relationships is a common and important problem that is worth solving while it is still manageable.