Hello and welcome to this post and newsletter for subscribers only! Today, we’re diving into the powerful world of Design Thinking. This is a great framework for anyone looking to innovate, solve complex problems, and become a better experience designer, whether for their business or any other organization.
Design thinking is a non-linear, five-phase process used to solve problems and create new ideas. The phases are: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. The key to this methodology is its human-centered approach; it focuses on understanding the needs and motivations of the people you’re designing for. This deep understanding is crucial for creating solutions that are not only effective but also genuinely useful and desirable.
The very first phase, Empathize, is very important. It’s all about gaining a deep understanding of the users (customers, visitors, guests etc.) of your service or product. This means setting aside your own assumptions and biases to truly see the world from their perspective.
Now let’s dive into one of the tools in the first phase – Personas! They are the starting point and base of many methods in design thinking and helpful in many situations, for example, when you’re in the first phase of trying to identify challenges and problems in your offers.
Think of personas as fictional characters that represent your ideal customer, user, visitor, or citizen—whatever works best for you. It all depends on what field you’re in. When you’re creating these personas, they can be based on real research and data (if you have it, of course!). But honestly, a lot of the time, you’ll need to use your imagination and brainstorm with your team. If you have membership info, mailing lists, or anything like that, you can usually find some helpful data there. You can also collect information over a period of time, like maybe a week.
Say you run a café—your counter staff could take notes for a day or a week and get a sense of who your regular customers are—age, gender, families, kids, musicians, blue-collar workers, retirees, that kind of thing. You could even ask some of your customers to fill out a quick form.
If you’re starting from scratch and don’t have any data yet, get your team together and have them come up with four to six personas based on what they know about your customers. And don’t forget to make a few personas based on the target groups you’re hoping to attract. That way, you can come up with some fresh ideas for expanding your reach.
Creating personas is great to do in a collaborative workshop setting. By bringing together diverse perspectives and insights, you can develop richer and more nuanced representations of your target audience.
Here’s the magic of personas:
- Empathy Boost: By giving your customer a name, a face (even if it’s a drawing), and a life, you’re forced to step into their shoes. What are their frustrations? What are their dreams? What do they do for fun?
- Focus: Personas keep your team grounded. When decisions get tricky, you can always ask, “What would [Persona Name] think?”
- Communication: Personas make it easier to communicate your customer’s needs to others.
Above is just one example of a persona made in a quick first design thinking workshop.
Creating an Insightful Persona:
- Gather Data: Talk to real customers (if possible), analyze website traffic, review customer service records. Anything that gives you insights into their behavior and needs.
- Give Them a Name and a Face: Make them feel real. A picture (even a simple illustration) can go a long way.
- Some examples of what to include:
- Demographics: Age, location, occupation, income.
- Psychographics: Values, interests, lifestyle, personality.
- Technographics: How they use technology, their preferred devices.
- Goals and Frustrations: What are they trying to achieve? What obstacles are in their way?
Aim for creating a set of personas that represent different segments of your target audience. You and your business or project decide what information is of interest. Maybe tech skills are irrelevant, then skip those.
For running a persona workshops with your team, you’ve got lots of options! You can keep it simple with pen and paper, create some handy worksheets, or go digital with a template for an online workshop (Mural, Miro, MS Whiteboard—whatever you prefer!).
One can try all sorts of layouts, depending on the client and the project, of course. Honestly, the best thing is to experiment and see what works for you and is easy to understand for your team or workshop participants. Have fun with it, and don’t be afraid to create your own templates!
By creating compelling personas, you’ll ensure your design solutions truly meet the needs of the people you’re trying to help.
Read this blog post with examples of business sectors that benefit from experience design.
For those who want to fast-track the transformation of their business offers, professional business coaching in design thinking and experience design is available. Ask about our available coaching here.
I hope you were inspired. In coming newsletters here on WordPress and in the list on Mailerlite we’ll dive into methods for empathizing!
Exercise: In the next subscriber-only post, we’ll look into empathizing even more. Try making a couple of personas of your customers. You can then use them in the exercise in the coming newsletter!
See you soon! :)
