Other Peoples’ Shoes: See life differently

This, for me, has been one of the most successful techniques I conceived whilst developing the Royal Mail Innovation Lab. For many of us it is difficult to envision or even appreciate other people’s lives – this was very evident in some of the early product development workshops I ran as all the product ideas served the needs of the people – mostly middle class professionals – rather than the actual audience that we were targeting.

We all assume, usually wrongly, that everyone lives their lives as we do – has our experiences, our wealth, our family, our values and our education – and in reality this mix is very particular to you/me. No-one in the world has had this same mix and therefore has the same view of the world and the same needs. Marketing companies through the ages have tried to get round this by producing various categorisation frameworks such as Acorn and other Goedemographic coding systems to try and reduce the complexity and fit us into a ‘pigeon hole’ – typically using education, location and earnings as metrics. Although historically this technique has proved useful I am not sure how robust these techniques are in today’s’ online, web enabled world, although I guess that is the subject of a future post.

So getting back to Other Peoples’ Shoes. This technique forces, usually a group of 8 – 12 people, to take on the persona of a specific group of people – usually identified by behaviours rather than wealth or other factors such as education etc. I tend a simple two-by-two matrix for this exercise which gives four persona’s to work with. The dimensions you use are up to you and will be dependent on your situation. For this example I am using people’s attitude online services and whether they have a positive or negative attitude to life.

This approach gives four behaviour types to work with – Recalcitrants, Connectors, Mouse Potatoes and the New Enlightened. Each of these types would demonstrate different ways of interacting, have different values and different habits. The first thing to do is to craft the story of a typical individual in this group – who would they be, how would they live, what would they do and more importantly how would they interact with others.

Once this has been done the next stage is to connect these personas with your situation, issue or problem and then look at what that would mean to this group. What would it mean to them? How would they interact? What would they value?

Clearly I have only skimmed the technique and given you a taste of what is possible but hopefully using this approach would provide some new insight into your problem, issue or future. If you are interested in discussing further or have a different approach that you think would be of interest get in touch.

Please comment below…