In this blog, we'll explore methods for building empathy with your customers, delving beyond standard approaches to persona creation, and uncovering the emotional depth that drives more meaningful user insights.
When was the last time you heard a story that truly resonated with you? One that pulled you in, made you feel, and left a lasting impression? Crafting a powerful story is no accident—it's a skill that can be learned and refined. I focus on that in my 'Influential Storytelling' course, an online live training program I'm excited to be running in collaboration with the team at the Future Skills Academy.
In the realm of human-centred design, we face a paradox. We listen to stories brimming with emotions and experiences during the research phase. Yet, as we synthesise these narratives into user personas, the original stories often dissipate, leaving behind mere shadows of their former richness. This became evident nine years ago during my initial training…
Acting is about telling the truth. This can seem counterintuitive, considering the costumes, makeup and sets that go into the average play or series. It is carefully constructed and fabricated. And yet, if the performances aren't convincing, an audience will tune out or walk away if it doesn't feel authentic. Acting is a powerful medium…
"I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger." ― Samuel L. Jackson Character development is central to telling a good story. A story feels flat without well-rounded and believable…
Personas help us understand and empathize with the end user. A persona is a fictional representation of a target user group that helps to bring a human face to the data and insights gathered during research. However, to design genuinely empathic experiences, we need more than just personas to build a deep understanding of the user's emotional landscape. That's where character development comes in, and acting skills can expand our connection with the people we are designing for.
William Shakespeare was a playwright, poet and theatre owner who lived over 400 years ago. His work is still performed today, translated into countless languages, taught in schools and studied by scholars. How does someone achieve this type of longevity? Two words, Shakespeare was – ‘audience centric’.
But this is not why is conceptualising what our lives will be like in the future is difficult. The wiring of our brains leads us to be bad at it. We evolved to think day by day. To survive situations as they occurred in weeks and months. And for hundreds of thousands of years, this has served us well.
We listed the pain points and the pleasure points and mapped out what the persona was thinking and feeling. Then we started building out deeper insights. What did this persona need, that they may not even understand themselves?
I was feeling a bit lost. As an actress, a person who is trained in creating representations of real people, I knew I didn’t have the right information in front of me. If I had to play this persona as a character I would have no idea how to do it. I would not understand how to build dialogue that reflected how this person would see themselves and the world. I would be completely at a loss. And to compound the confusion the rest of my team seemed confident to build deeper and deeper insights.
Improving Empathy In Your Design Process, Create Characters For Your Personas! Human-centered designers use empathy-based processes to understand the people they are creating solutions for. Being able to see through another person’s eyes can feel like magic or good luck. And yet the tools to make this a repeatable and reliable process are within our…
Storytelling Built For Innovation 