Our topic:
For our project, we are curious to see how we can encourage people (particularly busy students) to help practice mindfulness through creativity and different forms of expression.
What we learned:
We learned from our pre-study interviews and baseline study that people want to try creative practices but feel constrained by time and lack of ability. We saw that people are more inclined (or at least have reported) to follow through on doing something creative if they are doing it in a social setting or a dedicated class that is already in their schedule.
The Persona:
We developed a persona of a typical Stanford student named Normal Nelson, who often finds themself too busy with classes and socializing to engage in creative activities throughout their daily life. We heard one student explain they “had a series of meetings and classes with a very rushed lunch in the midst of it all. I had a little downtime in the early afternoon when I chatted with friends and tried to catch up on work. After that, it was back to an evening of back-to-back meetings and class.” While most people mentioned they express themselves creatively often in their day-to-day life, we learned from the diary study that few people actually do spend time doing so. Our persona highlights the student at Stanford who values creativity but does not currently find or prioritize time to work on creative hobbies in their daily lives. Their goal is to find time in their busy lives to practice creativity and make this a regular part of their schedules.
Normal Nelson’s Journey Map
Next, we made a journey map following a typical day in the life of Nelson, which illuminated several key emotional changes and touch points that expanded on our understanding of the problem space. As you can see in the journey may below, the mornings are a bit of a slow start, with happiness peaking the middle of the afternoon, and then emotions becoming more stressed and sad as the day progresses after that. We found in our diary study that the evenings were often stressful as that is when students would be booked with meetings and also finding time to do their own homework. Some key areas we found that we could improve are the mornings (which are not usually filled with work) and the late nights where students might need a creative outlet as a brief break to refresh themselves while working on their assignments.
