The define step is really crucial to the design thinking process as a whole. You need a persona that captures your target market, whether that’s an existing market or a new market you’re hoping to attract. For my group, we created Cross-Country Karen, a middle-aged, married mom of 2 who travels frequently for work but likes to save up her miles to take family vacations. I have always thought creating a persona is really fun because it’s like coming up with the characters to a book or movie but not having to write the rest of the story. You can go into as much, or as little detail as you want; maybe Karen’s son plays soccer but hates it and only plays because his father played in college, maybe Karen has an unhealthy obsession with Indian food but her children hate it so she can only get it when she travels. None of these details matter but sometimes its a good group bonding activity to flesh out your persona, and as long as they don’t distract from Karen’s pain points in regards to traveling, its harmless fun.
After the creating Karen, we focused on making “how might we” statements that would help Karen, and Delta, be more sustainable, without requiring too much effort on her part. HMW statements can be tricky to create because they need to be specific enough that people can narrow their focus, but broad enough that they don’t only have one solution. For example “how might we encourage Karen to purchase carbon offsets with her miles,” might be too specific, but “how might we encourage sustainability,” is far too broad. Crafting good HMW’s is difficult so we all suggested multiple and then voted as a group on the best ones. The first HMW we decided on as a group was “How might we connect gaining miles with sustainable behavior?” and the second was “How might we reduce in-air miles and idling time.” Both of these HMW’s focused on making sure Karen, as the consumer, had to do minimal work because we know that Karen’s are a large base of Delta’s market and they’re busy. Karen’s priority is getting her son to his soccer game, not making sure she’s flying sustainably, and we needed to recognize that if we wanted a solution that worked for her.