After college, most people find a job and move into a new apartment. Well, after finding a job as a requirements analyst, the next thing I needed to do was find a new place to live. However, I had one slight problem. I was trying to find a new place to live that satisfied my three roommates. While I had been living with them before, finding a new place was going to be hard. Each roommate has a specific personality and certain criteria that they each want in this new place.
At first, searching for a new apartment with my roommates was easy. But as time went on, it became more and more apparent that I wasn’t going to get much help from my roommates. I would ask one roommate to call a few places while I was at work. But when I would get home, they had decided that they would rather sleep all day. This pattern of laziness continued for some time. I would ask them to even just look online for potential places. But every day, I’d come home from work and get nothing but excuse after excuse.
Finally, being fed up with all the excuses I was getting, I decided to use my newly acquired skills as a requirements analyst to see if there was a way in which I could solve this dilemma. At first, I thought about what models I could potentially use to determine where to find our new apartment. I spent hours building different models. But every time I tried to discuss and explain the models to my roommates they would either tear them up or just sit on them. I didn’t know if it was because they didn’t like the models or if they were just being rude.
Feeling like I was never going to find a solution that satisfied all my roommates desires, I chose to take matters into my own hands. I was going to sit down and create user personas based on each of my roommates in an attempt to determine what exactly each roommate was looking for in this new apartment. While at first I struggled to truly capture the nature of each roommate, I began to make headway in my lengthy struggle to find a new apartment. I finally completed the personas of each of my roommates and thought I would share what I created.
In Part II of this series, I will use additional models to help establish and solve my apartment crisis. Thank you for reading, and feel free to share your personal experiences with conflicting personas and how you solved the problem!
