The role of this design approach is to allow designers to personally experience their design in the context of the target audience during the design process. This design method allows designers to personally experience the user experience of the target user. By re-enacting scenes and situations you are attempting to improve, you can get a better sense of what the experience may feel like and where you need to concentrate your main focus on improvement. You can also remember the experience more vividly when you physically experience it, rather than draw it out in a storyboard, for instance.
Steps
The main goal of prototyping is to make an idea just tangible enough to elicit a response, whether from you, your team, a partner, or whomever you’re designing for.
Decide which of your ideas you want to Role Play and assign the necessary roles to your team members.
Take about 30 minutes to determine the necessary roles, who will play them, and what it is that you’re looking to test—is it a type of interaction, whether a person will respond to a type of product, the effectiveness of a sales pitch?
Costumes and props can be highly effective tools in bringing your Role Play to life. Don’t spend ages on them, but consider making your prototype that much more realistic. You’d be surprised how far just a few details can go toward making a Role Play feel real.
Example
In order to create a user-driven prototype, you should ask the users to create something that enables you to understand how they think about certain issues. For instance, if you are interested in creating an improved airport waiting experience, you could ask users to draw out what they think is the ideal airport waiting process — or you could give them a bunch of Lego bricks and encourage them to show you their dream waiting area in an airport. Alternatively, if your solution is a website, you could ask your users to create a sketch of what features they think the website should have. For user-driven prototypes to be useful, you should balance the amount of help you offer the users so they do not feel lost (and thus fail to ideate), while making the session open enough so that you can learn more about the users without shepherding them towards your own ideas, which would defeat the purpose in this light.
Advantages of Role-play
1. Thought diversity and richer insights
One can get a large number of diverse ideas from different participants. Additionally, role-play is a far superior method to generate design ideas as it lets the participants act and react naturally as they work otherwise in a service interaction or a simulation exercise.
2. Quick idea generation
With more individuals involved in the activity, many ideas can be generated quickly.
3. Creative problem solving
Stimulates creative problem solving within the group. With a few variations, designers can also understand how the same users may react in different scenarios or different user experiences within the same scenario.
4. No fear of judgment
Participants usually participant in role-play without fear of any judgement as the activity of role-play is a fun activity.
Disadvantages of Role-play
1.Time Consuming
Is more time-consuming than a few other methods such as brainstorming and focus groups as well as more exhausting.
2.Innovation
May not result in unbiased innovative ideas from a single person. Again, new participants playing a role in the same scenario, and the same participants playing different roles in the same scenario are different versions of role-playing and must be tried to get richer insights from each session.
Stats
Suggested Time
30-45 Minutes
Level of Difficulty
Moderate
Materials Needed
Costumes help, but aren't entirely necessary
Participants
Design team, perhaps community members
References
Service Design Lab. (2020). EMPATHY WORKSHOP — Service Design Lab. [online] Available at: https://www.servicedesignlab.net/empathy-workshop [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
FRIIS DAM, R. and SIANG TEO, Y. (2020). Prototyping: Learn Eight Common Methods and Best Practices. [online] The Interaction Design Foundation. Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/prototyping-learn-eight-common-methods-and-best-practices [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Designkit.org. (2020). Design Kit. [online] Available at: https://www.designkit.org/methods/36 [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Think Design. (2020). Role Play in User Research | Think Design. [online] Available at: https://think.design/user-design-research/role-play/ [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].