By the end of Milestone 2, you should have a clear idea of who your users are, and what their needs are? You should also have a clear design concept. But at this point, it shouldn't have that much detail. You're really just outlining the basic functionality of the system that you're designing, and what some of the basic interactions would be. I'm going to leave you with a few tips to think about why you're pursuing this milestone. First of all, remain open to what you hear from users. So when you formed your initial concept, you had some ideas about who your users are, and what their needs are? Well, now you're going out and you're talking to actual users, and you may find some of your initial assumptions are incorrect or misguided. You need to stay very open to hear what your users are telling you so that you can steer your project in the right direction. At this point, you really want to resist premature commitment to ideas. Don't fall in love with your own ideas at this point. You're going to be sketching. You're going to be developing solutions that you think might work to the problems that you're identifying, but we're very early in the process. You're going to be learning a lot more as you go forward. One of the things you want to keep in mind when you're doing your sketching and ideation is to come up with lots of different ideas instead of just settling on the first idea that you have. Keep your mind open. Try to explore broadly. You are going to have to come to some decisions towards the end of this milestone and going into the next milestone, but you want to try to stay open as long as you can. When creating personas and scenarios, ask yourself, "Are these personas detailed and rich enough to help me decide what would be a good direction for my design, and what would not be a good direction for my design?" If they're really generic and they could apply to anything, they're not going to help guide your design, and the same with scenarios. With a scenario, you're trying to paint a picture of what a successful interaction would be like? Ask yourself, if that scenario is useful enough to help you determine whether a particular design idea is going in the right direction or going in the wrong direction? If it's not, try to put a little bit more meat on it and make it more specific so that it can help guide your design decisions going forward, because you're going to be coming back to these personas and scenarios throughout your design process. So you want to make sure they're actually useful and not a placeholder that you wrote up to fulfill some assignment.
