Over the past few weeks our Team has immersed ourselves into the problem space by conducting a deeper dive into research within our problem space. We then constructed a user persona of the what we determined to be the average biker on Rice’s campus based upon our own research and previous assumptions.

 

Our user persona, Speros P., is a sophomore at Rice University majoring in Kinesiology and minoring in Business. Speros uses his bike relatively frequently compared to other students. He has run into problems with his bike in the past but has not thought much of it. He owns no tools to fix these problems. The extent of his familiarity with his bike is a bike pump. He has heard of Rice Bikes but hasn’t gone because he doesn’t think that the issue is serious enough to justify spending his money on repairs. His issues have not led to direct collision or anything serious.

 

This user persona reflected some of our key insights of the problem such as there being underlying issues with the bike that the user was unaware of and there are issues that the user might consider too small to be worth going to Rice Bikes to have it fixed. Reasons why the user is not going to get their bike fixed is because of their lack of understanding their bike and the menu if repair pricing at Rice bikes. These insights came of discussions with the manager of rice bikes and through our own secondary research.  

 

To further expand upon these insights and assess their validity on a larger scale, our team came up with a few interview questions to ask student bikers and we could compare these answers to our assumed user persona.

 

Interview Questions:

 

• Thanks for meeting with us; we are members at Rice Design for America (brief explanation as to what that is). We are members of a team exploring bike safety on Rice’s campus. We wanted to ask you a few questions because we thought this project may be relevant to you.
• What do you use your bike for? How often?
• How familiar are you with the mechanics/inner-workings of your bike?
• Do you have any tools for fixing your own bike? Any knowledge of how to do that?
• Has your bike ever broken or have you had problems with it (that you know of)?
• If so, what did you do when it broke?
  • Have you ever been to Rice Bikes?
    • If no, why haven’t you been to Rice Bikes?
    • Why?
    • If yes, walk me through the experience from one step to another
  • What would motivate you to go to Rice Bikes?
• General question about satisfaction with Rice Bikes?