Role-playing and UX Research
- Who am I?
- Where am I?
- When is it?
- What do I want?
- Why do I want it?
- How will I get what I want?
- What must I overcome to get what I want?
These questions are relevant to UX research and product development. But they don’t come from the realm of design or user experience. So why do I bring them up here?
What is UX’s role in the product development process?
While studying for my degree in Human Factors I was introduced to a newly popular pastime, role-playing games. (Yes, I’m that old and a D&D nerd). As it turns out, the user-centered design process and preparing an RP character have a lot in common.
Role-playing games are stories in which you control one of the characters. To know how to act and interpret what happens in the story, you have to understand the world in which the story takes place.
My first game took place in ancient Rome, run by a guy who baked a lot of historical accuracy into his “world”. We spent sesterce, not dollars, urban cohorts patrolled the streets, not police and the social order included senators, equestrians and plebes.
To play my character, I had to replace what was familiar with details from ancient Roman life. This would be true regardless of the story’s genre or where and when it takes place. If we’re spying in East Germany, I’d have to learn how things worked in Cold-War central Europe.
Besides relieving the pressures of graduate school life, role-playing helped me learn an invaluable UX skill, how to grasp another person’s perspective. When playing an historical character it’s easy to put aside what you know. It’s not as easy with customers and users whose time, place and reality may seem like to our own.
“Empathy is one of our greatest tools of business that is most underused.” — Daniel Lubetzky
As anyone who’s done user interviews knows, even people we think are “just like us” can see the world entirely differently. My best user research happens when I come to it as though I’m learning how to pass as a character in a completely unfamiliar environment. Little or nothing can be taken for granted. Everything must be validated by observation.
“Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.” — Sterling K. Brown
I asked what our role is as UXers…
To me, our first role is to represent the users’ abilities, limitations and thought processes to a product team. This is more than collecting a bunch of facts about the user. I find I’m much more effective when I try to “become” the user in the ways that are relevant to the product or service. When I come to the research as though I’m going to play a user in a movie, or better yet, do their jobs for a week, I find it much easier to know what to ask them and learn about their activities. This makes it easier to come to the research as a blank slate and let the user’s reality inform me.
About the questions at the top, they’re the seven steps in Konstantin Stanislavski’s system of acting known as “The Method”. What makes for great theater can also make for great research. Maybe the Actors Studio could offer a course or two in user experience.
