verstehen

I ran a workshop for a client a few days ago, where I had to discuss personas and design ideas with a range of stakeholders from the company. The majority of people in the room where from a non-UX or design-related background, and ranged from directors to marketers. I tried a couple of games to get them thinking from the perspective of the personas, and thought some elements of it might work for others.

Their familiarity with personas ranged from limited to non-existent, so I wanted to find a way not only to explain what personas were, but also to get a direct feel for the value themselves. Firstly I gave a short presentation on the research we’d conducted to underpin the personas and how we analysed the data to derive the personas, and the reasoning behind the particular layout and structure we’d used.

Games to bring personas to life

After that was the fun part. I’ve given presentations like this before and seen how the personas themselves get ignored in any subsequent discussions, and even when handed out simply don’t get read. So for this event I decided to do something different.

I split the audience into 3 groups (to match the number of personas we had) then asked each group to focus on one specific persona. I then handed each person a sheet with the headings “gains” and “pains”, and asked them to consider – based on current circumstances for that client – what the “pain” points were for that persona when using their services, and what would be the most valuable “gains” for that persona if we changed the status quo. This game (the “pain – gain map”) was lifted directly from the Go Gamestorming website, and I highly recommend the accompanying book.

Even those who were dubious initially couldn’t help but think of the personas as real people, because they became immersed in the reality of the problems. I have to say that, given the audience I wasn’t sure this method would work, but it really got them thinking of the personas as a tool for understanding problems and solutions.

Persona timelines

I followed this up with a different game based (very) loosely on another game from the same website, the “History map”. I varied it by creating a timeline that fitted the potential range of time and range of activities over which a customer might interact with the client’s service.

On this timeline I then asked each group – again representing a specific persona – to add post-its to the timeline to indicate how they might interact with their service, when, and using what channels. I also asked them to add the potential pain points of the current service to the different points on the timeline. Again, this worked well and helped everyone to see how different customers interact in very different ways.

Collaborative design

All of this led to the final design activity. Groups had to write up a list of potential design concepts – in purely textual form – and on a sheet had to relate each concept to a particular persona and explain why it might benefit the customer and the business. These ideas were then all passed to the next table, who had to sketch their favourite three ideas.

I’ve tried collaborative sketching sessions before, but the key difference in this session was the thorough grounding in the personas that came first. Without that people just sketch ideas in their heads that seem interesting to them. With the earlier games, the sketching was immediately focused on how the problems would affect the personas.

It was one of the most successful sessions of it’s kind that I’ve facilitated, so I hope some of these ideas might be of some use to others. I’m under no illusions that this is ground-breaking or new, and I know Jared Spool in particular has promoted role-playing with personas for example, but I thought it was worth sharing all the same.

I’d love to hear what works for you too, or where you’ve hit any brick walls…