04/02/19 - POINT OF VIEW (II) - Main Findings

As expected, this session was all about exchanging the information that all the groups collected and about creating a common knowledge base. Therefore, we started with completing and presenting a so-called “Empathy map” which is a tool to summarize the information from the observation phase and to communicate it to other groups of the class. In an empathy map, you put yourself again into the perspective of the persona and complete its thoughts & feelings, what the persona sees, hears, speaks and does, and also his pains and gains.

When talking about the citizens’ thinking and feeling, it can be said that they fear that there are too many cars driving too fast in Langenau, so that it is dangerous for bikers, especially because there are not enough bike lanes. They are also afraid of getting into a situation, where physical restrictions limit their mobility e.g. when one broke his leg and cannot drive his car anymore, he might not get out of Langenau without being reliable on others. Many interviewees also mentioned their hope that taking part in the survey can raise the awareness and the possibility that something is going to be improved in Langenau, e.g. the availability of free parking spaces.

Something we heard very often when talking to the interviewees was: “My son always says, that…” or “I know from my sister who has a child in a stroller, that…”. It is thus very important to consider that the hearing of a persona influences its perceptions and very often in a survey one might not actually gather the own experience of the interviewed person, but rather what the surrounding of the person thinks.

When interviewing the personas, also what they see can influence what they say. If for example we were standing at the sidewalk and the interviewed person was seeing kids riding their bikes on the sidewalk, it is for sure that the most urgent aspect mentioned to be improved is building more bike lanes. We were mostly interviewing while the persons were waiting for their bus to come or when they were walking on the sidewalks.

Whilst speaking to the interviewees, they were mostly in a hurry, some were not so polite, others were very open and friendly. Talking about certain aspects could really effect a change in their attitude, which was then often marked by sarcasm, irony or also anger. 

Most commonly mentioned aspects that could be related to pains are for example the problems with public transportation, the partly limited physical accessibility (wheelchair, stroller, age, injury) or the skepticism regarding alternative mobility solutions like eMobility. Many interviewees were very happy about the recently implemented NauBus. Some other gains are that Langenau in general is a well-developed small town with an attractive and convenient location.

After finishing and presenting the empathy map, each group quickly summarized their main findings by writing a short text that includes the comparison of different views, the description of trends, the explanation of causality and a conclusion that summarizes the main ideas. This task was very tough to accomplish in the limited amount of time that we were given. Finally, each student quickly had to create at least seven user stories from the perspective of their own or another persona considering the information we collected during the observation phase. User stories are thus another point of view tool and have the following structure:

As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some reason >.

One of my user story sentences was for example: As a student, I want more bike Lanes in Langenau, so that I don’t have to ride on the sidewalk or on the street.