He worked as a product manager and product owner with a strong focus on user experience, innovation management and agile product development for different companies.
Where ideas exist for products or features, User Experience UX -related aspects are usually not given enough consideration. Role-play exercises enable the implicit knowledge of experts which then can be used to identify and refine UX-related factors in product ideas. From early childhood, people use role-play to try out roles and get to know them. Their experience provides them with a more in-depth understanding for the roles and also teaches them how to interact with each other.
This original learning method can therefore be applied by most people without a great deal of preparation. Personas i. Scenarios offer contextual information and provide a scope for the role-play exercise to move on. In product development, all persons involved e. The ultimate ambition is to develop products that generate the greatest possible acceptance and enthusiasm by real users. It is challenging to evaluate product experiences early on, when they are just ideas or prototypes [ 2 ].
Role-playing is a process from which social skills and perspectives on use in a real-life environment are gained [ 17 ]. The gathered knowledge can be assigned to different assessment characteristic categories, for example in must-be, attractive and rejection characteristics according to the Kano model [ 13 ].
In the next sections we will focus on the user as a role. Then we will discuss the role-play situation and afterwards general patterns of role-play exercises. The understanding of the user as a role and of the role-play situation provides a basis for using role-play exercises while the pattern helps to develop precise role-play sessions.
