Validating the problem.

Before I showed her my design, I decided to speak to her and just make sure I picked out the right problem that she was actually facing. I live with my sister, I want to believe I literally know everything that is up to her. So I spoke to her to know if this is really a problem she is facing or she is just being very picky with finding a bookshelf. She laughed and said “I am actually so frustrated with this because normally I am a picky person but this time if I can find something closest to this bookshelf I had go for it, I just don’t want my money to go to waste”. While I was designing the solution, I had these questions and thought in my head about if this is what she really need and not just want, I thought about why she needed this exact type of design, the decisions she has made of not wanting to waste her money on any other kind of bookshelf if it’s not the exact type of bookshelf that will satisfy her need so she doesn’t have to keep changing and I am happy I thought of this because she had actually tried other options that was available to her. 

she needs this exact type of bookshelf because she is killing two birds with one stone. At her school she’s giving weekly engineering projects, where she will be using her desktop, laptop and some books to help her with her given projects. A bookshelf that can contain all three with a large table space will be perfect for her to do her projects without interruptions or distractions from moving to a table to another. I totally understood her, she was also concerned with wasting her money because bookshelves like that aren’t so cheap as she ended up returning the bookshelf she tried earlier. She needs a bookshelf that will be for the long term and not just short while.

Because she was pleased with the design I made for her, we visited home improvement stores, home depot, home goods, ikea and target. We didn’t want to buy from ikea because their items don’t last for long time, so we were bit skeptical from buying their products, I spoke to an employee and they didn’t have the designed we needed, although the employee actually saved us the stress and told us what we could do to solve this problem. In Ikea there is how you can buy parts of a bookshelf and table and because I was the one that personally designed the bookshelf, I knew exactly the kind of pieces we needed in order to build this. Ikea sold to us the individual parts we need in order to bring this bookshelf to live and this is actually going to work. She was really happy and thankful for this, a problem that had been troubling her for a year one is about to be solved.