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Personas: Behold the User

As part of our second Sprint, we’ve built spatial based user personas addressing three different freelancer groups to understand our users. Because our Sprint goal will address a new manner in which to re-frame energy sharing beyond saving, we’ve started to grasp the ‘on-the-go freelancer’.

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Peter Parker has a casual life — he spends his mornings drinking fair trade coffee and reading articles on micro-finance enterprises in Far-awayes-stan. When he’s not playfully joking with the professionals that share his office space, he’s playing his interactive polyglot game that allows him to connect with programmers, designers, and social entrepreneurs (like him) that are trying to bring about change and make a socially driven start up.

 

 

 

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Margreet works from home — she’s single and occasionally talks to her AI to keep herself company. She’s a self-starter entrepreneur that needs to save. She’s starting up her own sustainability enterprise and she needs co-founders, programmers, and designers … but it has to be collaborative because she can’t afford to hire at the moment. She goes to Seats2Meet once a week to network and recruit people that would be interested in sustainability.

 

 

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Romana is based in Berlin but she’s a remote worker working as a freelancer consultant. She believes in inspiring ideas through other cultures by traveling to developing countries to improve and facilitate development programs. When she’s not busy working in her temporary room she’s commuting from client’s offices to hotels to facilitate workshops.

 

 

To involve users and integrate ‘real-life’ personalities into archetypes, we conducted an online survey along with a ethnographic safari documentary to observe ‘on-the-go’ freelancers in their natural working environment.

Battery Anxiety is a Real Thing

The Freelancers involved showed us two working dynamics. A freelancer — Simone, a battery dependent director that always keeps a back-up battery to be on the safe side and Bouke — multi-disciplinary designer that has high-end devices, leaving him plug free through-out his work day.

 

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The Battery

Through our personas and observations, we found a new relationship with energy that was constructed through the battery. The battery icon has become more than a mere symbol for the daily power expiration of a device, but a symbol of anxiety and stress. High dependency on devices has intertwined the negative emotions involved in daily life — starting with the absence of the device.

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