Using Stanislavski's 7 Questions for Innovation and Product Design
Actors and writers need to deeply empathize with their characters. They do this because they have to embody their characters and walk along their journey. To a lesser extent, an innovator or designer needs to be able to understand the person who's using their product or is potentially going to use their product.
Using Stanislavski's 7 questions
Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of method acting, had in mind 7 questions every actor should ask themselves when they have to embody a new character.
How can we, as innovators or designers, use this set of questions to help us understand our audience?
First of all, the questions:
Who am I
Where am I
What time is it
What do I want
Why do I want it
How will I get what I want
What must I overcome to get what I want
Let's dive in and figure out what each question can give us:
Who am I
This is about discovering the big and small details of what makes up your user. This includes demographics, occupation, close relations, who they live with, significant events in their lives, etc. Now, obviously, you won’t be asking users about significant events in their lives for example, but what is key is that you zero in on those elements that relate to your product and the purchase. Then when you get a glimpse of that, you dig deeper. For one user, their demographic will be important, for another, it will be the fact that they work at a certain job. For yet another one, it will be the fact that they used a similar product in the past and had a tremendously negative experience. You want to make sure that by the end of your conversation with your user, or any other form of data collection, that you have a solid idea of who the user is.
For example, let’s say your product is a set of noise-canceling headphones. You are trying to understand why a particular user bought your product. What becomes salient to you are the following details: They are in their 20s, They live with multiple roommates and they are introverted and appreciate time alone. All these details lead you to believe that the reason they bought your headphones is it's a way for them to separate themselves from the world, and watch Netflix in their room without disturbing their roommates.
Where am I
Specify a location for where your user is in each part of their journey, and importantly try to understand what they feel about that location. Let's keep using the example above. The user, let's call her Jill, bought her headphones because she wanted alone time in her room. If we dig deeper into where Jill is and what she feels about her space, we understand that even though her room is private, the fact that there are adjacent rooms and that people live there, makes her feel like she needs another layer of privacy. Hence why she bought our noise-canceling headphones.
What time is it
Time is a weird thing. Not in the sense that it's a flat circle. But in the sense that for our purposes, it refers to two things:
Historical time: What season is it? What day of the week? What part of the day? Is it lunchtime? Is it bedtime?
Personal time: How old is our user? What time in their life are they? Are they still young and adventurous? Are they older and looking to settle down? In our personal narratives, we implicitly or explicitly place ourselves at a certain time within a narrative. When we are at the end of our 20s, we tell ourselves "I'm just about done partying, and getting ready to settle down." When we're at a certain job, we tell ourselves "I'm at the end of the rope here, I had fun working here at the beginning, but now it might be the end." In order to understand our users, we need to understand what time in their life they think are in — because this is subjective.
So for our example with Jill and the headphones, we can focus on what matters to us. The historical time matters to us because it seems like Jill is using the headphones at night. What can we do to make that experience better? Do the headphones usually emit a blinking light? Can we turn that off so that it doesn't disturb Jill while she's watching a movie in the dark?
What do I want?
From a writer’s perspective, when you write characters, especially when they're within a certain narrative, drives and ambitions are what propel the story. These drives inform the actor who then needs to represent a character with those drives. There are two kinds of drives. Macro drives and micro drives. Macro drives stretch across the narrative. Harry Potter's macro drive or value is love. The Big Lebowski's macro drive is comfort. Micro drives or goals inhabit the character in specific scenes. These goals should classically align with the macro drive of the character.
In product, we can take this same notion and apply it to the way we understand our users. Users have particular struggles and frustrations, but how do those coalesce into a goal? To get back to our example, What is Jill's macro drive? We can assume it's comfort. How can we apply this to our product? How about advertising the cushions that line the speakers? Or can we collaborate with a streaming service or a bedding company to offer some deal? All of these products are synonymous in that they enhance comfort.
Why do I want it?
This speaks to the fact that there's often a line that stretches across one's life, and within that line, there are values and drives that influence our behavior. When a user wants something, there's usually more than a functional reason. They don't just want headphones to listen to Netflix (a micro drive), they want headphones so they can spend some time alone comfortably (macro drive). Spending time alone then is a feature in that person's personality, and will likely be reflected in other experiences they will recount about their life.
How will I get what I want
This question can help us discover two things:
What are the current solutions or tools our user is using in order to achieve their goals?
From a marketing perspective, what is the actual journey the user takes in order to find these solutions and how can we position our product in the relevant place and using the relevant language.
What must I overcome to get what I want
In the same way that we discover what journey users take to reach their goals, or what past journeys they've taken, we can then understand also what they are doing to avoid problems on their way. Importantly, we discover what their definition of “obstacle” is and in what context. For one user, roommates would be a tool they can use in a social manner, but for Jill in our example, the fact she has roommates and that they can hear her in her room is an obstacle she has to overcome.
As you can tell, these questions bleed into each other. This means that sometimes a particular detail will answer two or more questions or that a single question will provide details that we can apply in multiple ways.
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