Pretending for a living - why actors are all UX designers
at UX Brighton 2013
Type
talk
Personas are a common UX stand-in for role-play: inventing a coherent character to design and test against. Acting craft and UX both depend on inhabiting someone else's goals, constraints and emotional state. Participatory and role-play methods bring stakeholders into enacted scenarios rather than abstract requirements. IDEO's public writing often covers enactment, prototyping and human-centred storytelling in design practice.
PrototypingBuilding disposable stand-ins for a product — from paper and clickable wireframes to coded spikes — so teams can try interactions before committing to build. Used to explore options, align stakeholders, and run usability tests on something people can click or walk through. Fidelity should match the question: low for flow and structure, higher when timing, motion or real content matter.