In a previous article I talked about the value of drawing things from your brain, and hinted at a special little word — prolepsis.
Or as I call it, the lawyer thing.
What is prolepsis?
Definition: The anticipation and answering of possible objections in rhetorical speech. [Source]
Say what now? rhetoric? buh…
OK, stay with me.
- Rhetoric is “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing”. Gotcha.
- You need to speak in order to do UX design and user research. Yup.
So prolepsis is a way of planning ahead for a conversation, so you can respond more efficiently to the person you’re engaging with — because you know that a single conversation (2 hour stakeholder interview, 1 hour user test, 10 mins with a person on the stand) is going to matter a hell of a lot and you need to get the most out of them that you can.
It can look like this:
Yes people, pens — not software. And no, there isn’t a button you can press to do this. Hard things are hard. Use your brains.
What it can do for us as UX people
1. Designing user and stakeholder interviews
You have a number of topics to cover in an hour, you know some of them are related or connected, and maybe you know some of them are challenging, sensitive or political — you can draw them out.
That’s right — one big giant mental model of all the connections between the topics, how one might transition from one to the other depending on what the respondent says.
Yes it’s mental gymnastics, but it’s a great way to prepare and build your mental model of the research session, especially if you’re a visual thinker who can’t insert a 10 page research plan into their brain.
2. Designing user flows and content structures
When it comes to the wonderful world of IA, using prolepsis can help you again with the mental model of your content, but also to create hypotheses to test with users, for example in card sort or tree test sessions.
It can help you create user flows through your experiences to ensure you are offering your users a next best action at each stage.
Or simply to demonstrate to other team mates and stakeholders the connections between different content types. Surprisingly a spreadsheet doesn’t do it for everyone.
3. Voice interactions
This is my favourite new use for prolepsis — designing voice interactions. I’ve already written about this but I truly recommend drawing conversation flows out first with pen, then using something like Voiceflow to start visualising and connecting the prototype.
If you’ve used prolepsis in the first two cases, you’ll know before you start how complex voice and conversation design can become. In fact, it’s also a great exercise to do with clients and stakeholders in a workshop if they keep saying things like “but can’t you just knock out a voice app? it only has to be a simple eCommerce experience like the website”.
4. Getting a raise :)
Difficult conversations are difficult. But if you know it’s coming you can prepare. If you know the person you’re dealing with, you can map out the conversation in advance and, like the lawyers do, start predicting objections and reactions and how you might respond.
Works for pretty much any difficult conversation or presentation you have coming up.
How I discovered this
Finding and using this was essentially an accident.
- It’s how I think anyway — I tend to draw everything, make connections and look for patterns
- I’m a control freak and I like to overprepare for everything
- I somehow knew it was a thing that lawyers do, probably from some legal drama I watched on TV, hence I’ve always called it “the lawyer thing”
- Some clever chap I used to work with who googles everything (hello Alec) made the connection for me to the actual word prolepsis.
This is my experience, but I’ve also trained others to do this and I can assure you that for at least some of you this will work and make you better at dealing with research sessions, general mental gymnastics, complex IA and content problems, and challenging conversations.
Many of you are probably already doing this, and don’t even know it.
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