This week we worked to define our goals for this project. Because this is a human interest project, we have struggled to assign a quantity to our success, and what we are designing is more abstract than concrete. Our focus this week was to decide on the ultimate purpose of what we we’re creating, defining what we want to accomplish and what is important to us to have in the end. Ultimately, our goal is to connect socially conscious customers to The Community Cloth, and this week we set out how we would quantify success in doing that.
The current tag setup from The Community Cloth. Visiting them in person helped us understand what our goals were and where our focus should be.
The short term goals we have set are as follows: for new The Community Cloth customers to understand the organization after encountering our materials, for socially conscious customers to walk away knowing 3 things about a particular artisan, and for establishments that provide fair trade products to agree to have The Community Cloth promotional materials at their place of business. Our medium term goal is for website and social media engagement to increase by 20%, and our long term goal is to have conscious customers agree to host a trunk show, for a minimum total of 5 trunk shows in the next year. We arrived at these goals after meeting conscious customers in person at an event and speaking with a woman who fit our user profile. From her we learned what she looks for and connects with when shopping artisan. From the people at The Community Cloth, our biggest takeaway was: “People find us because they were looking for something like us”. This helped us focus on what The Community Cloth’s current setup is lacking, and caused us to shift most of our focus from customers to The Community Cloth itself.
If these goals were absent we might still be in the customer-focused mindset instead of focusing on the organization. If we had not checked in with The Community Cloth in person, we may have overestimated their ability and manpower. Finally, without these goals we might have misconstrued TCC’s purpose and people’s feelings and perceptions about it (we want to invoke empathy, not sympathy).
