Intel was exploring the feasibility of a mobile phone that felt like the user’s personal assistant; the list of potential must have features was a mile long and included things like phone would always be listening and could handle natural language processing. To create a phone that a person could depend on in that way required that we know who our users were and how they currently used their phones.

To help kick off the project, I quickly made a pair of hypothetical personas, including rough sketches of each persona’s day in the life. I started telling their stories and talking about them like they were real people, and slowly so did the rest of the 500 person group working on “Iron Man.”

In my role as a User Experience designer, I created the UX strategy for the project and was able to influence my leadership to use this strategy to help show the value of the project. I also maintained the day-in-the-life charts. I help do some of the research and assisted in the analysis.

Challenges

Team challenge: people were slow to start the project. There was a general lack of focus; people wanted to show value but it was scattered and lacked focus.
Project challenge: it is can be difficult to get buy-in on UX research and strategy at the moment it is needed.

Approach

By quickly creating hypothetical users it gave the team people to focus on and validate; it also allowed us to share the user perspective with the larger group. We used storytelling and UX research techniques to help a broad audience of people working this project to understand better what we were making and why.

Outcome

Iron Man was eventually shelved, but the method and techniques we used to share about our users were adapted into the group. The research and strategy from this project helped to educate people about user experience and human-centered design, and it made it easier to get buy-in for the next project.

Skills Used:

Managed
User Research
User Journey
Storytelling

Led
Persona Development
User Journeys

Contributed to
Product Management
Persona Validation Research
User Journeys