Idea Generation
Role Play
Overview
During role-play, human actors who are either the sample users or the designers themselves perform a hypothetical service experience, already developed using other techniques, in front of a small audience of other stakeholder. It is best used for 4–15 people.
The implied condition is thinking that the service really exists and then building a potential journey through some of its functionalities. Often the same scene is performed several times, changing the character profiles on each scene in order to understand how different users would act in the same situation.
Role-play has several advantages in creative service design. It can help stakeholders to contribute to improving service experience. It allows stakeholders to enact different situations involving customer contact with service, without needing to develop any concrete version of the service touchpoints. Moreover, it allows different stakeholders to fulfil different roles, and thereby develop empathy for other stakeholder and service consumer roles.
What to do
Undertake Role Play in the following 4 steps:
- Role-play is effective when a new service design and experience has already been created, and the first versions of the key service consumer and touchpoint roles and forms have been decided. Therefore, the facilitator guides a discussion with designers to decide the service activities, consumer roles and touchpoints to be enacted. Human actors can fulfil non-human roles, e.g. a mobile app or an organisation, for the purpose of the role-play. Other stakeholders could play the role of an audience, observing, taking notes and reflecting on each role-play experience.
- Once the roles of the stakeholders in the role-play have been decided, an outline sequence of service activities should be agreed, but a detailed script should not be developed – the aim is to enact the service to explore its current strengths and weaknesses.
- The human actors enact the service in front of the audience, members of which take notes to review the enactment at the end. A service enactment can be repeated as many times as needed by the team, using different service consumer personas and service situations to enact the service under different conditions. Audience members are encouraged to think creatively about possible future improvements of the service while the service is being enacted.
- After one or more enactments, the facilitator leads a reflection among all stakeholders to discover possible problems and opportunities for service improvement, and select which changes can be introduced in further enactments. All ideas are written in a flipchart.
People
Works best with 4–15 people.
Problem solving characteristics
Role Play is useful when you want to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a new service design.
Creative phases
Role Play is useful if you want to generate ideas for improvements on a first version of the design.
Location
Any large space according to the number of participants.
Equipment
A description of the design, pens, paper and a flipchart.