When working with innovation and generating new ideas for services or products, there are often good intentions of involving the user early on to inform and validate our assumptions, ideas, and proposals. However, often it’s not feasible due to constraints such as budgets, time, or other resources. But that doesn’t mean you cannot apply the principles of user-centered design – you just need to engage your inner role-player or actor and draw insights already available to you through your experiences with the user.
This tool helps you organize knowledge about your user, and in doing so, creates personas that you can utilize throughout your process. A persona is a fictional person who represents your user or target group. The persona is defined by as many details as possible, making it easy for everyone on the team to imagine how this fictional person would react if presented with ideas, perspectives, or questions that arise during the innovation process. In that sense, personas can be used when feedback from real users is not readily available and serve as an everyday reference point when discussing decisions to be made. Often, you will have several different personas to represent your entire user group.
How to use the tool:
- Define your targetgroup and scope. In your team, discuss your target group. Decide on a few general characteristics and then determine the most important questions. Is it what motivates them to do certain things? Is it what holds them back? Is it related to their dreams, fears, or beliefs? Or is it a hands-on curiosity about how they navigate a normal day in their life? Everything can be relevant here, but remember to keep an open mind and define your questions broadly to learn as much about your user as possible. Decide on 1-3 questions or themes.
- Assign roles. One of you will play the user, and one will be the interviewer (or date, if we maintain the dating metaphor ;)). The person playing the user starts by filling in the top three boxes of the user profile/persona sheet. The interviewer/date prepares how to approach the interview/date in a way that will provide as much information related to your questions or themes. If it makes sense, the interviewer/date can use the neurological mapping diagram for note-taking, simple sheets of paper, or sticky notes. Make sure to write down your insights one by one so that others can easily differentiate and read them.
- Now the date or interview begins. The person playing the user builds the character along the way, answering the questions on your user/persona sheet during the conversation.The interviewer/date aims to gather information related to the theme or questions about the user. Try to stay in character and have fun exploring who this user is. Set a timer and continue the conversation until time runs out or until you feel you cannot gain more information from this approach. (But keep it to a maximum of 10-15 minutes.)
If you are a group of more than two people working on the same challenge, first narrow down your target group and primary questions/themes together, then divide into pairs and proceed with the exercise’s steps. To add excitement, you can implement the speed dating principle of rotation, so that the interviewer/date rotates to the next user every five minutes, making it more dynamic and offering each interviewer/date a sense of different representatives of the same target group.
This way, the exercise serves as a quick method to generate a range of sketches for different personas within your target group. You can later flesh them out in even more detail or keep them as they are.
Extra downloads:
Examples in use:
