Preparation

This week, we received an estimate from the graphic designer we’re going to work with for our persuasion design project. Due to circumstances outside of our control, it will take longer than expected to approve the purchase order for this work. This was somewhat demoralizing news for my group, but I think it’s important to realize that these situations happen in the real world. There are always factors outside of your control that can have an impact on your efficiency and effectiveness.

Consequently, we have been thinking of ways we can continue to progress while waiting to give the go ahead to the designer. This has been tricky because the persuasion portion of our Capstone is the central piece of the project, but we’ve come up with a few ideas.

Some of the paths we tried going down were a dead end during the earlier parts of the semester, but others yielded good supplementary content for our final report. We conducted many one-on-one interviews, came up with several promising ideas using Systematic Inventive Thinking, and gathered some useful insights through in-store observations. All of this can be incorporated into our findings. As we wait for the persuasion portion to move along, we are starting to sift through the work we did earlier in the semester, organize it, and mold it into useful information for our client. We are also creating the backbone of our Qualtrics survey that we will use to test our persuasion ideas.

This has all been an exercise in time management. How can we best use our time while we wait? We are meeting tomorrow to flesh out this plan for the next few weeks. At this point, we know that we will not be done by the end of the semester. We are aiming to give our client presentation the first or second week of May. Reflecting on all of the twists and turns of Capstone, I am happy that the setbacks have only pushed us a couple weeks past our goal. In the end, I’d much rather present a thorough project that I’m proud of than a hastily constructed half-effort.