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MS2
Below is the list of problems selected by the team for analysis during this sprint:
- Sidequests: Breaking out the Routine
- Wellness made fun
- Content centralization
- Skip the Line Campus Lunch Pickup
- Interviewee: Camilo Sánchez (22 year old, Colombian male)
- Interview time: 7–8 minutes
- Objective: Validate whether users feel trapped in their routines, what friction prevents them from trying new things, and whether playful stimuli (gamification/sharing) would motivate them.
Purpose: Set expectations, create a relaxed environment, and gain consent.
Script:
"Hello! I’m working on a project about how people spend their free time and break their routines. There are no right or wrong answers, I just want to hear about your actual experiences. This will take less than 10 minutes. Do you mind if I take a few notes?"
Purpose: Understand the interviewee's baseline behavior and see how deeply entrenched they are in their comfort zone.
Question 1
Think about a typical weekend or your free time after studying or working. How much of that time is spent doing the exact same routine versus trying something completely new?
Question 2
When you hang out with your friends, who usually decides what to do, and do you usually stick to the same places?
Purpose: Understand the pain points. Are they staying in their comfort zone because they want to, or because they lack ideas, money, or motivation?
Question 3
Tell me about the last time you thought about doing something different or slightly out of your comfort zone, but you ended up not doing it. What exactly stopped you?
Examples: lack of time, no one to go with, too much effort to plan, etc.
Question 4
On the flip side, tell me about a recent time you did try something new. What pushed you to actually do it?
Purpose: Test specific solution triggers—playful stimuli and the desire to share—without explicitly pitching the app.
Question 5
Imagine you receive a random, playful challenge for the weekend—something simple but unusual, like:
- "Find the best pan de bono in a neighborhood you've never visited."
- "Take a photo of a specific landmark."
How would you react to that kind of prompt?
Question 6
If you completed a weird or fun challenge like that, would you want to share it? If so, who would you share it with and on what platform?
Purpose: Close the interview and leave the door open for future prototyping.
Script:
"That’s super helpful, thank you! Is there anything else you think makes it difficult to get out of your routine that we didn't cover? Thanks for your time."
- Interviewee: Tomás Fuentes (Colombian male, Chemical Engineering student, 22 year old)
- Interview time: ~6 minutes
- Objective: Validate how much time students lose waiting in cafeteria lines during their free gap between classes, understand the emotional friction this causes, and test reactions to a pre-order/pickup app concept without pitching it too early.
Purpose: Set expectations, create a relaxed environment, and gain consent to record. Script:
"Hi Tomás, thanks for making time for this. This is for a project for the Mobile Application Construction class. I'm going to ask you a few questions about your experience with lunch and the cafeterias on campus. Could you give us a quick introduction of yourself, and confirm you're okay with me recording this conversation for academic use in the course?"
Purpose: Understand the interviewee's baseline behavior around campus lunch and how frequently he experiences the problem.
Question 1 How many times a week do you eat lunch at a cafeteria on campus?
Question 2 Walk me through the last time you had lunch on campus, step by step, from when you left your previous class until you sat back down to eat or study.
Purpose: Understand the pain points around time pressure and lines — how much of the free gap gets consumed, and what emotional impact that has.
Question 3 How much actual free time do you have between that class and the next one?
Question 4 How much of that time normally goes into waiting in line?
Question 5 When you're in line, what frustrates or worries you the most?
Question 6 Have you ever decided not to eat lunch, or to eat something different, because you didn't have time to wait in line?
Purpose: Test the specific solution concept — ordering ahead and skipping the line — and surface trust/adoption barriers without over-selling the idea.
Question 7 I want to share an idea with you: an app where you order your lunch in advance from your phone and pick it up already prepared, without waiting in line. What would you think about that? Be as complete and specific as you can.
Question 8 What would make you doubt or distrust using something like that?
Question 9 What would that app need to have for you to use it every day you decide to eat at the cafeteria, not just once?
Question 10 Would you like to have the option to pay from within the app?
Purpose: Close the interview and capture anything left unsaid. Script:
"Is there anything else about your experience eating lunch on campus that you think I should know, that I didn't ask about? Thank you so much for your time, this really helps with the project."
- Interviewee: Alejandra Quevedo (Colombian female, 22 year old, Uniandes student)
- Interview time: 10–15 minutes
- Objective: Understand how university students experience stress and emotional overload, what they currently do to regulate themselves, what prevents them from maintaining self-care habits, and what could make a wellness tool engaging, easy to use, and trustworthy.
Purpose: Set expectations, create a relaxed environment, explain the purpose of the interview, and gain consent.
Script:
"Hello! Thank you very much for helping us. We are researching how students experience stress, well-being, and self-care in their daily lives to understand what actually helps them and what is difficult to maintain. There are no right or wrong answers; we just want to learn about your experience. This will take around 10–15 minutes. Do you mind if I take notes or record the interview?"
Purpose: Understand the student's daily context, workload, routines, and the moments in which stress or emotional overload usually appears.
Question 1
Tell me a little about what a normal week looks like for you as a student. What activities take up most of your time?
Examples: classes, assignments, work, sports, social activities, commuting, etc.
Question 2
Within that routine, when do you usually feel the most stressed, anxious, tired, or like you need to disconnect?
Question 3
When you have a difficult or exhausting day, what do you normally do to feel a little better?
Examples: exercise, music, social media, sleeping, talking to someone, gaming, going out, meditation, etc.
Purpose: Understand a real recent experience of emotional overload, what triggered it, how the student reacted, and what barriers prevented them from managing it effectively.
Question 4
Think about the last time you felt really stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, or emotionally exhausted because of something related to university. What happened?
Follow-up:
How did the situation develop from the moment you started feeling that way until you eventually felt better?
Question 5
Was there any moment when you thought, "I should do something to feel better," but you ended up not doing it? What stopped you?
Examples: lack of time, not knowing what to do, lack of motivation, embarrassment, wanting to be alone, forgetting about it, or feeling that available tools were too complicated.
Question 6
At that moment, what did you feel you needed the most?
Examples: calming down, distracting yourself, talking to someone, feeling supported, organizing your thoughts, understanding what you were feeling, etc.
Purpose: Understand which self-care strategies students already know, which ones they actually use, and why wellness tools or habits are maintained or abandoned.
Question 7
Have you ever tried self-care techniques such as breathing exercises, mindfulness, meditation, journaling, gratitude exercises, grounding techniques, or something similar?
If yes:
How was your experience, and do you still use them?
Follow-up:
If you stopped using them, why?
Question 8
Are there activities or applications that you naturally use almost every day without needing someone to remind you?
Examples: Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, Duolingo, video games, sports, or streaming platforms.
What makes it easy for you to keep coming back to them?
Question 9
Have you ever downloaded or used an application related to mental health, wellness, meditation, sleep, habits, or emotional tracking?
If yes:
Did you continue using it, or did you eventually stop opening it? Why?
Purpose: Explore what could make self-care easier to practice regularly and test whether personalization and playful elements could increase engagement without trivializing mental health.
Question 10
Imagine there is a tool that can help you feel calmer or more emotionally regulated in just two or three minutes. What would it need to have for you to want to use it again the next day?
Question 11
Some applications use elements such as:
- Daily streaks
- Progress tracking
- Small challenges
- Achievements
- Levels
- Characters or avatars
- Rewards
- Personalized recommendations
Would any of these make taking care of your well-being more engaging, or would they make mental health feel less serious?
Why?
Question 12
When you are stressed or emotionally overwhelmed, how would you want a wellness application to feel?
Examples: simple, fast, friendly, relaxing, playful, empathetic, private, personalized, or conversational.
Question 13
Would you prefer an experience like this to be completely private, or would you be comfortable sharing certain achievements or activities with friends?
If so, what would you be willing to share, and what would you never share?
Purpose: Understand the barriers between students and professional mental-health support and explore how a digital tool could serve as a bridge rather than a replacement for professional care.
Question 14
When you feel that a problem is becoming too difficult to manage by yourself, how do you know when it is time to ask for help?
Question 15
If you wanted to talk to a psychologist or seek professional support, would you know exactly where to go?
How easy or difficult would it be for you to take that first step?
Question 16
What would a wellness application need to have for you to trust its recommendations?
Examples: professional validation, scientific sources, university support, privacy, transparency about data, or control over personal information.
Purpose: Allow the user to describe the ideal solution based on their needs without imposing predefined features.
Question 17
Imagine you could have a tool on your phone that helped you during difficult moments. Without thinking about technical limitations, what would you want it to do for you?
Question 18
Imagine it is 11:00 p.m., you have an exam tomorrow, and you are extremely stressed. You open the application.
What would you want to happen during the next five minutes?
Question 19
If you could only keep one feature or capability from everything you just described, which one would be the most important?
Why?
Purpose: Close the interview, capture any insights that were not covered, and leave the door open for future interviews or prototype testing.
Question 20
If you could change just one thing about how university students receive support for their well-being, what would you change?
Script:
"That was very helpful, thank you! Is there anything else about stress, well-being, self-care, or asking for help as a student that you think is important and that we didn't discuss?"
Optional Question:
Do you know another student who might have a different experience from yours and who could be interesting for us to interview?
Interviewee: Sara Sanchez Interview time: 15 min
Question 1
To start, tell me a bit about what a normal week looks like for you on social media. Which apps do you use most, and what do you usually use them for?
Why: To understand the student's social media habits, most-used platforms, and the contexts in which they consume content.
Question 2
Within that routine, when do you usually come across something you want to save for later?
Why: To identify the situations and types of content that trigger the need to save something.
Question 3
When you see something you like and want to save it, what do you usually do?
Why: To understand the student's current saving behavior and the different methods or workarounds they use.
Question 4
Think about the last time you looked for something you'd saved on social media and couldn't find it, or just gave up looking. What happened?
Why: To explore a real and recent experience of losing or failing to retrieve saved content and identify the difficulties involved.
Question 5
Was there ever a moment when you thought, "I should organize this," but ended up not doing it? What stopped you?
Why: To identify the barriers that prevent students from organizing their saved content, such as lack of time, motivation, or an inconvenient process.
Question 6
In that moment, what did you need most: to find it quickly, to have everything in one place, to remember why you'd saved it, or something else?
Why: To identify the student's main functional or emotional need when dealing with saved content.
Question 7
Have you ever tried using folders, notes, bookmarks, or an app to organize what you save from social media? How was your experience?
Why: To understand which organization methods students have already tried and how effective or convenient they found them.
Question 8
Is there an app you use almost every day without anyone having to remind you? What do you think makes it easy to keep coming back to that app?
Why: To identify the characteristics, habits, or motivations that make digital products easy to use consistently.
Question 9
Have you ever downloaded an app to save or organize content, such as notes, bookmarks, Notion, Pocket, or something similar? Did you keep using it, or did you eventually stop?
Why: To understand why students maintain or abandon organization tools and identify factors that affect long-term use.
Question 10
Imagine you found a tool that brings together everything you save from different social platforms and helps you find it in seconds. What would make you want to keep using it the next day?
Why: To identify what could encourage continued use and turn content organization into a regular habit.
Question 11
Some apps use streaks, levels, points, or rewards to keep you coming back. Would that make organizing your saved content more engaging, or would it feel unnecessary? Why?
Why: To explore whether gamification could increase engagement without making the experience feel unnecessary or childish.
Question 12
When you want to find something you saved, how should the tool feel so you'd genuinely want to open it?
Why: To understand the qualities and type of experience students expect from a content organization tool.
Question 13
Would you prefer what you save to stay completely private, or would it make sense to share certain collections or notes with friends? What would you never share?
Why: To understand privacy expectations and whether students would value any social or sharing features.
Question 14
When you feel like you have too much saved and disorganized to catch up on, how do you know it's time to actually do something about it?
Why: To understand what triggers students to recognize that their saved content has become difficult to manage.
Question 15
If you wanted to organize everything from scratch, would you know exactly where to start? How easy or difficult would that be?
Why: To identify difficulties involved in starting the organization process and whether students feel they have a clear starting point.
Question 16
What would an app need to have for you to trust that your saved content, notes, transcriptions, and tags are safe and private?
Why: To identify the factors that influence trust, especially privacy, transparency, control over personal information, and data security.
Question 17
Imagine you could have a tool on your phone that automatically organized everything you save from social media. Without thinking about technical limitations, what would you want it to do for you?
Why: To allow the student to describe their ideal solution based on their own needs without limiting them to predefined features.
Question 18
Let's say two weeks ago you saved a video with a recipe or an idea you liked, and now you need it. You open the app. What would you want to happen in the next 30 seconds?
Why: To translate abstract expectations into a concrete interaction and understand what the ideal retrieval experience would look like.
Question 19
Of all the things you described, if you could only keep one, which would be the most important? Why?
Why: To prioritize the student's needs and identify the feature or capability with the greatest perceived value.
Question 20
If you could change just one thing about how you save or find content on social media, what would you change?
Why: To identify the student's most important unmet need and capture a final insight that may not have appeared in the previous questions.
Is there anything else about how you save or organize content on social media that you think is important and that we didn't discuss?
Why: To give the interviewee an opportunity to mention relevant experiences, needs, or problems that were not covered by the interview questions.
Ask about real past experiences whenever possible instead of hypothetical behavior. Let the interviewee answer spontaneously before using examples or suggested options. Avoid proposing specific features too early, as this can bias the responses.
- Interviewee: Arianna Ortiz (21 year old, Colombian female, Uniandes student)
- Interview time: 6–7 minutes
- Objective: Validate whether users actually lose track of content they save across social platforms, understand their current (likely broken) organization system, and test reactions to centralization, tagging, and transcription as solutions — without pitching the app too early.
Purpose: Set expectations, create a relaxed environment, and gain consent.
Script:
"Hi! Thank you so much for taking the time to participate. The goal of this conversation is to get a better understanding of how people handle the content they find online specifically the content they find interesting or useful and want to save to revisit later. This could be anything: Instagram posts, TikToks, YouTube videos, recipes, products you want to buy, recommendations, articles, podcasts, and so on. We are interested in understanding what you currently do when you come across something you want to keep: where you save it, how you organize it, and what happens to that content afterward. Is it okay if I take some notes during the conversation?”
Purpose: Understand baseline behavior — where and how much they save, without leading them toward the problem yet.
Question 1
Think about the last week. How often did you save, bookmark, or screenshot something online because you wanted to come back to it later?
Question 2
Where does that saved content usually end up? (Instagram saved folder, screenshots, notes app, Pinterest, WhatsApp to yourself, etc.)
Purpose: Surface the actual pain — do things get lost, forgotten, or never revisited? Is this a real friction or a non-issue?
Question 3
Tell me about a time you tried to find something you knew you'd saved — a video, a post, a recipe, a product — but couldn't remember where you'd put it. What happened?
Question 4
How often would you say saved content just... sits there and never gets used? Why do you think that happens?
Question 5
If you had to explain your current "system" for organizing saved content to someone else, what would you say?
Purpose: Test specific solution triggers — a single organized space, personal notes/tags, and transcription — without over-explaining the app.
Question 6
Imagine there was one place where everything you saved from any app — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp — automatically landed, already organized. Would that change how you use saved content? How?
Question 7
If you could add a quick personal note or tag to something you saved (like "recipe for Sunday" or "gift idea for mom"), do you think you'd actually use that feature, or would it feel like extra work?
Question 8
Some saved content is video or audio — a recipe explained in a reel, a tip in a podcast clip. Would having that automatically turned into searchable text be useful to you? Why or why not?
Purpose: Close the interview and leave room for anything uncovered.
Script:
"That's really helpful, thank you! Is there anything else about how you save or lose track of content that we didn't cover?"
- Interviewee: Sebastián Rodriguez (22 year old, Colombian male, Uniandes student)
- Interview time: 7–8 minutes
- Related problem: Skip the Line Campus Lunch Pickup
- Objective: Validate whether waiting in line is a real pain point during the campus lunch break, understand what students sacrifice because of it, and test whether pre-ordering with a scheduled pickup would fit their actual daily flow.
Purpose: Set expectations, create a relaxed environment, and gain consent to record.
Script:
"Hi! I'm working on a project about how students eat on campus during the day. There are no right or wrong answers, I'm just interested in what you actually do. It'll take less than 10 minutes. Do you mind if I record the audio just so I don't miss anything?"
Purpose: Understand the interviewee's real baseline behavior around lunch on campus, before introducing any notion of a problem.
Question 1
Walk me through your last lunch on campus, step by step: from the moment you realized you were hungry until you actually sat down to eat.
Purpose: Reconstruct a real, concrete sequence of events instead of a generalization, so we can map each step of the journey and detect where time is lost.
Follow-ups: What time was it? Were you alone or with someone? How long did the whole thing take?
Question 2
Of that whole break, how much time would you say you spent waiting versus actually eating?
Purpose: Quantify the perceived cost of waiting and see whether the interviewee experiences it as a problem or as something normal and accepted.
Purpose: Understand the pain points and the trade-offs students already make. Are they choosing what they want to eat, or what the line allows them to eat?
Question 3
Tell me about the last time you didn't eat what you wanted on campus — you settled for something else, ate somewhere else, or skipped lunch entirely. What exactly happened?
Purpose: Surface the concrete friction (queue length, class schedule, price, crowding) through a real past event, and reveal the hidden cost of the problem.
Follow-ups: What did you end up doing instead? How did that make you feel? Does that happen often?
Question 4
When you know a place is going to be packed, what do you do about it?
Purpose: Identify the workarounds and hacks users already invented on their own, since an existing workaround is the strongest evidence that a real need exists.
Follow-ups: Does someone save you a spot? Do you go earlier or later? Do you send a message to a friend?
Purpose: Test the pre-order and scheduled-pickup trigger, grounding it in past behavior first so the answers are not purely speculative, and without explicitly pitching the app.
Question 5
Have you ever ordered food from your phone to pick it up in person instead of having it delivered? How did that go?
Purpose: Anchor the hypothesis in real prior behavior and detect whether the mental model of "order now, pick up later" already exists for this user.
Follow-ups: Did you keep using it? What made you stop?
Question 6
Imagine that between classes you could order and pay from your phone and just show up at a set time to pick your food up. Walk me through when in your day you would actually use that — and what would make you not trust it.
Purpose: Test the fit of the proposed solution against the user's real schedule, and deliberately probe for the objections (paying in advance, food not ready, no confirmation) that would break adoption.
Purpose: Close the interview and capture anything relevant that the script did not cover.
Script:
"That's super helpful, thank you! Is there anything else about eating on campus that annoys you and that we didn't talk about? Thanks for your time."
| Situation | What | How | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1: Adhering to a Highly Repetitive Free-Time Routine | Camilo spends 90% of his free time repeating the exact same typical activities in his daily life after finishing work. | Once his workday ends, he defaults to highly familiar, repetitive behaviors such as talking to his sister, watching TV series or movies, or playing basketball. | These activities represent his immediate comfort zone. They require minimal cognitive effort, present no social anxiety, and do not demand active planning or coordination, making them highly comfortable fallback options that he repeats out of habit. |
| 2: Joining Externally Organized Alternative Plans | Camilo occasionally breaks his routine to try alternative, non-typical activities with his friends. | He does not organize or initiate these events himself; instead, he joins plans that are already fully scheduled and coordinated by others. | While he is open to breaking his routine, he suffers from habit inertia and a lack of active personal initiative. When the entire friction of organizing, deciding, and planning is eliminated by his social circle, he is eager and willing to participate because the barrier to entry has been removed. |
| 3: Rejecting Unfamiliar Social Invitations (The Social Barrier) | Camilo declined an invitation to go hiking/climbing a mountain, despite it being an opportunity to do something different. | Upon being invited to climb a mountain (an activity he had never tried before) with a group of people he did not know, he decided to pass on the plan. | He has a very closed and specific circle of friends. The double friction of doing an unfamiliar activity alongside strangers made him feel that he would not be in his own environment, triggering social discomfort that completely outweighed his desire to try the activity. |
| 4: Overcoming Barriers through Strong Intrinsic Interest | Camilo occasionally takes risks and steps completely out of his comfort zone to try something new. | He voluntarily enters completely unfamiliar social environments and attempts new tasks. | He is driven by deep, intrinsic interest in a specific topic. When his personal curiosity or passion for a subject is strong enough, it completely overrides his social reservations, giving him the motivation to take risks and explore new settings even if he does not know anyone there. |
| Situation | What | How | Why | Who |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1: Feeling Overwhelmed by Academic Workload | Alejandra is trying to keep up with demanding university courses that require knowledge from previous semesters, while also managing several academic responsibilities at the same time. | When she feels behind or does not fully understand what is happening in class, she becomes mentally overloaded, lost, and disconnected. She describes the situation as feeling like there are too many things to do in order to catch up. To manage it, she first tries to recognize that she is overwhelmed, then evaluates what she can handle by herself, and finally asks for help if necessary. | The accumulation of academic responsibilities may create a strong feeling of losing control. Feeling behind increases the perceived size of the problem and makes every pending task seem more difficult. Her process of recognizing the problem, evaluating her abilities, and asking for help appears to be a way of recovering control and preventing the situation from becoming even more overwhelming. | A university student with a demanding academic routine whose time is mostly occupied by classes and assignments. She is reflective and self-aware, but can still become emotionally overloaded when she feels that her academic demands exceed her current knowledge or capacity. |
| 2: Using Self-Regulation Techniques Only When Needed | Alejandra uses different self-care and emotional regulation techniques such as breathing exercises, writing down her thoughts, sensory grounding, exercise, organizing her schedule, and spending time with people she values. | She does not follow these activities as a strict daily wellness routine. Instead, she uses them flexibly when she notices that her mind is becoming saturated. When her thoughts move too quickly, she writes them down; when she feels overwhelmed, she uses breathing or grounding exercises; and she organizes her tasks to avoid keeping everything mentally stored. | Mental overload and overstimulation appear to be major sources of discomfort for her. These techniques help her externalize thoughts, reduce mental clutter, and regain a sense of calm and structure. This suggests that self-care tools may be more valuable when they are immediately available at the exact moment of need rather than when users are forced to complete them every day. | A student who already has experience with therapy and knows several emotional regulation techniques. She is familiar with self-care practices and knows how to use them independently, but tends to activate them reactively rather than as part of a strict daily habit. |
| 3: Choosing Familiar Digital Tools Instead of Wellness Apps | When Alejandra feels highly stressed or emotionally overwhelmed, she usually turns to familiar digital tools such as Spotify instead of opening a dedicated mental-health or wellness application. | She reacts in a fast and low-effort way, choosing music she already knows will calm her or using white noise while applying other regulation techniques. Although she has previously used emotional trackers and wellness applications, these are not normally her first option during stressful moments. | Familiar applications require almost no learning, decision-making, or additional emotional effort. When she is already overwhelmed, opening a specialized wellness app may feel like extra friction. Music provides a predictable and immediate emotional effect, so she naturally chooses the tool that is already integrated into her routine. This suggests that the main competitor of a wellness application may not be another wellness app, but familiar everyday platforms that are easier to access in moments of stress. | A digitally active university student who uses her phone both for entertainment and self-management. She has experience with emotional trackers, screen-time controls, sleep-related settings, and wellness tools, but naturally gravitates toward platforms she already uses frequently. |
| 4: Seeking Immediate, Personalized, and Non-Judgmental Emotional Support | Alejandra wants a digital tool she can access when she feels emotionally overwhelmed but cannot clearly understand what is happening to her. She imagines being able to explain what happened and receive questions or guidance that help her identify her emotions and decide what to do next. | She wants the interaction to feel simple, friendly, empathetic, patient, personalized, and non-judgmental. She does not expect the tool to provide a medical diagnosis or completely solve her problems. Instead, she wants it to help her gain clarity through a short conversation. She would also like to personalize aspects such as the tone of voice, communication style, personality, or type of virtual companion. | There appears to be a gap between handling emotional distress completely alone and seeking formal professional help. In moments of emotional overload, she may need immediate support even when the situation does not require or allow a therapy appointment. Personalization could increase trust because different users need different styles of emotional support, and a generic or robotic interaction may reduce their willingness to engage. | A university student who is emotionally self-aware and already familiar with psychological support, but who still experiences moments in which she needs immediate guidance. She values empathy, personalization, patience, and interactions that make her feel understood rather than judged. |
| Situation | What | How | Why | Who |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1: Compulsively Saving Content Across Multiple Platforms | She saves content on a daily basis across Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, with almost no use of phone screenshots. | She saves items into each platform's default location — Instagram's Saved folder, TikTok's Saved folder, and Pinterest boards organized by category — without a consistent criterion for what's worth keeping. | The sheer volume of content on these platforms creates a reflexive urge to save "just in case," more of an aspirational gesture toward a future self than a deliberate plan to actually revisit the content. | An active, frequent social media user with strong aesthetic and lifestyle interests (fashion, colors, recipes, gift ideas), who treats saving as a low-effort default action rather than a curated decision. |
| 2: Losing Saved Content in the Volume of Instagram | She tries to find something she was certain she had saved on Instagram, but can't locate it. | She searches through her Saved folder, but the sheer amount of accumulated content makes the item impossible to find; she gives up fairly quickly and settles for something similar she comes across again in her feed. | Because the platform generates so much similar content, no single saved item feels irreplaceable — there's always a substitute nearby. This lowers the emotional cost of losing something specific, which is why her frustration is mild and short-lived rather than a serious complaint. | The same user, functioning here as a passive consumer overwhelmed by the platform's content density rather than as an intentional archivist. |
| 3: Saved Content Going Unused on Entertainment Platforms | On Instagram and TikTok, she reports that essentially 100% of what she saves is never revisited or used, unlike on Pinterest, which she actively uses as a source of inspiration. | She saves impulsively in the moment, driven by the belief "I'm going to use this," but no follow-up action ever brings her back — whereas on Pinterest she manually sorts saved items into themed boards. | Entertainment platforms lack any clear, recurring purpose for saved content, so items default to becoming clutter; Pinterest, by contrast, serves an ongoing personal need (inspiration), which justifies the extra manual effort of organizing it. | A user who distinguishes sharply between platforms based on purpose — entertainment (Instagram, TikTok) versus purpose-driven (Pinterest) — and is willing to invest curation effort only when there's a well-defined, recurring payoff. |
| 4: Welcoming a Unified, AI-Organized Saving System (Over Manual Tagging) | She responds enthusiastically to the idea of a single destination where content from any app arrives automatically, already organized — but shows only lukewarm interest in manually tagging or annotating saved items herself. | She imagines automatic organization saving her the time she currently spends sorting Pinterest boards manually, while manual tagging is something she'd use only occasionally, not as a habit. | She wants the outcome Pinterest gives her (organized, retrievable content) without the manual effort it requires. Any added manual step introduces friction that competes with her low-effort saving behavior, revealing that adoption depends on minimizing required user effort even when she recognizes a feature's value. | The same user, revealing herself as open to AI-assisted tools specifically because they reduce friction, while remaining resistant to any feature that adds a new manual task. |
| # | Situation | What | How | Why | Who |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arrives early but still finds a long line | Tomás leaves class at 11:20 already hungry, but the cafeteria doesn't open until 11:30 and a line has already started forming | He walks straight from class to the cafeteria, arrives before opening, and joins a line that keeps growing | His free time is limited (1h20–1h30), so every minute of anticipation matters before the line gets longer | Tomás and other students with similar time gaps who all arrive in the same time window |
| 2 | Double line (ordering + pickup) eats into his break | He spends 25–30 minutes in line to order, then waits in a second line to pick up the food once it's ready | He first lines up to order and pay, then waits in a separate line/area for the food to be handed to him | He's frustrated at losing time standing around doing nothing, when he could be resting; the double line nearly doubles the time lost (30–40 min total) | Tomás; indirectly, the cafeteria staff who manage ordering and pickup separately |
| 3 | Gives up on lunch or settles for something worse | Multiple times he decided not to eat at the cafeteria and bought a sandwich outside instead | When the line is too long, he leaves campus to buy a quick option instead of waiting | He prioritizes avoiding the line over having a full meal, even if it means staying hungry or eating something worse | Tomás, choosing between the cafeteria and outside options |
| 4 | Positive reaction to the app, but distrust around payment | When he hears the idea of ordering via app and picking up without a line, he reacts with immediate enthusiasm, but raises concerns about payment and order confirmation | He imagines ordering from his phone right as he leaves class (or a few minutes before), and arriving only to pick up, with no waiting in any line | He values getting back the time he loses, to rest or do other things; but worries the payment might fail or the order might not be properly registered | Tomás as a potential user; the app's payment/order system as the trust point |
| Situation | What | How | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1: Trading Menu Variety for Speed (The Off-Peak Trade-Off) | Sebastián had lunch at around 2:10 p.m. at a restaurant across from the Franco building, chosen by his friends while he was already on his way there. | The place was empty and he was served very fast, but the daily menu was almost sold out: only one chuleta valluna and about three chicken portions were left. He mentioned this only as a minor downside. | Arriving off-peak removes the queue but silently transfers the cost to variety: he gains time and loses choice. He has no way of knowing in advance what is still available, so he cannot make an informed decision. He has normalized this trade-off to the point of not framing it as a problem. |
| 2: Settling for a Disliked Option Under Schedule Pressure | On days with a tight schedule Sebastián goes to Subway, a place he explicitly dislikes, and in the previous semester he skipped lunch entirely on days with classes at lunchtime. | He does this reluctantly and against his own standards, since he describes himself as demanding about food and prefers grilled, protein-heavy meals. On the days he skipped lunch he stayed hungry until 5 or 6 p.m. | Under academic pressure, speed overrides both personal preference and nutritional standards. The real cost of the problem is not the waiting time itself but what he sacrifices to avoid it: food quality, health, and eating at a reasonable hour. This happened around five times during the exam weeks. |
| 3: Abandoning the Purchase Rather Than Queueing (The Impatience Barrier) | When Sebastián knows a place is going to be crowded he does not wait: he either goes somewhere else or stays hungry, and would rather pay more or walk farther than stand in a line. | He states this as an absolute personal rule rather than a case-by-case decision, attributing it to impatience. He never estimates how long the line might be; the mere expectation of a queue is enough to redirect him. | For this user the queue is not a cost to be weighed but a hard barrier: the restaurant loses the sale entirely and he loses access to the food he wanted. His willingness to absorb a higher price or a longer walk reveals that time has a concrete monetary value for him. |
| 4: Self-Invented Pickup Workaround to Protect Study Focus | During the previous semester Sebastián ordered through Rappi between five and ten times and picked the food up himself instead of having it delivered, choosing fast chains such as El Corral or Kokoriko. | He ordered from an available study room during full-day study sessions before evening exams and ate while continuing to study, explaining that interrupting the session made him lose his train of thought. | He independently invented the exact behavior our proposed solution offers, which is strong evidence that the need is real and not hypothetical. The trigger is not hunger but the protection of cognitive focus. His usage dropped this semester with a lighter course load, suggesting demand peaks with academic pressure. |
| Situation | What | How | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Content lost because the source account was deleted | She saved an Instagram post about Gram-positive cocci using Instagram’s native “Save” button. When she needed the information later, the account that posted it no longer existed. | She used Instagram’s native save feature without taking a screenshot or adding any notes. When she could not find the post, she searched for the topic from scratch on Pinterest until she found equivalent information. | She needed the information as a reference for an academic assignment. Saving it had a specific functional purpose, rather than being a “just in case” action. |
| 2. Abandoned organization attempt (Pinterest) | She tried once to organize her saved content on Pinterest using folders/boards. | She did it only once and never returned to that folder to search for content or maintain its organization. | She felt that it “wasn’t useful.” The effort of organizing did not translate into a benefit she could actually perceive, so she lost the motivation to maintain it. |
| 3. Notion abandoned due to complexity, moved to Google Docs | She downloaded and tried Notion to organize her notes and content. | When she opened it, she found it confusing and could not identify a clear structure. She stopped using it and moved to Google Docs, where she organizes folders by topic. | She needed something simple and immediate, without a learning curve or complicated introduction. She preferred something that took her directly to the content, similar to Samsung Notes. |
| 4. “Delete everything and start over” | When she cannot find something she saved, she becomes frustrated and sometimes considers deleting all her saved content to reorganize everything from scratch. | She has intended to start over, but never completes the process because manually organizing everything feels boring and difficult. | She wants to feel in control and be able to easily find what she saves. She would need assisted organization that provides a starting structure she can then adjust, similar to how Canva AI provides a base that the user can customize. |
The brainstorming process started individually. Each team member reviewed the situations, journey maps, and interview findings related to their assigned problem and generated possible solutions based on the needs, frustrations, and opportunities identified.
All ideas were then placed on a shared whiteboard without filtering them beforehand.
During class, the team reviewed the complete set of ideas, discussed their potential value, and organized them into four categories:
- The Rational Choice
- The Most Likely to Delight
- The Darling
- The Long Shot
This allowed the team to compare practical solutions with more innovative, engaging, or experimental alternatives.
- Pre-order and scheduled pickup.
- Live menu availability.
- Real-time crowd maps.
- Schedule-aware lunch planning.
- Group lunch ordering.
- Integrated ordering and payment.
- Order-ready notifications.
- One-tap reordering.
- Wait-time warnings based on available free time.
- Scheduled “ready by” pickup times.
- Ordering directly from the classroom.
- Playful challenge-based activities.
- A side-quest platform for discovering new experiences.
- Sharing discoveries with friends.
- Completing challenges over a defined period.
- Community challenges in predefined public locations.
- Unified cross-platform search.
- Automatic backups of saved content.
- AI-based content categorization.
- A minimal search-first interface.
- Personalized AI-generated organization structures.
- A unified inbox for saved posts.
- Automatic visual boards.
- Contextual resurfacing of forgotten content.
- Keyword/image-based cross-platform search.
- Instant Emotional Reset: quick 2–3 minute emotional support.
- Personalized Emotional Companion: a customizable and empathetic assistant.
- Wellness Through Familiar Activities: recommendations based on activities such as music, walking, writing, or breathing.
- Mental Clutter Organizer: organize overwhelming thoughts into clear next steps.
- Emotional First-Aid Gateway: guide users toward self-care, guided support, or professional help.
The solutions were not generated randomly. They were directly connected to the observed user behaviors, interview insights, pain points, and opportunities identified in the previous research activities.
It should be noted that the video shows Lucas Mejía, Alejandro Pardo, and Julián Contreras in the same location; for this reason, they turned on the camera to prove that everyone was present.
The order of appearance was as follows: Lucas Mejía, Sebastián Maldonado, Lex Betancourt, Julián Ramírez, Alejandro Pardo, and Julián Contreras.