Role-playing is a type of prototyping used to simulate a situation by acting it out. In Design Thinking, role-playing is used to give the audience an example of what the user’s experience with a proposed solution might look like. Through role-playing, the Design team creates an improvised situation that represents a potential use case for their solution, or a likely scenario that may arise during the customer’s journey and interaction with the solution.
Although role-playing is primarily used during the Prototyping step of the Design process, the activity can also be used to gain empathy for the user’s experience during the earlier steps of the process. When used during the Empathize step of the Design process, the Design team can gain an empathic understanding of the user’s experience through simulating what that experience feels like by re-enacting scenes and situations that the customer encounters.