Role Play Guide

This guide should be used with the methods outlined in the Role Playing section of Chapter 4 Explore the Community.

Role play lets you step into your customer’s shoes and act out their experience. It surfaces pain points, emotions, and breakdowns you might not see from the outside.

When to Use

To simulate tasks or situations where direct observation isn’t possible.
To explore how customers might feel using a new process, product, or service.
To test for friction points in journeys before building solutions.

Setup

Define the Scenario: What situation are you reenacting? (“Ordering lunch through a delivery app,” “navigating the airport with a stroller,” etc.).
Assign Roles: Someone acts as the customer, others as staff, systems, or obstacles.
Gather Props: Use physical stand-ins (phone, chair, bag, sticky notes) to make it real.
Clarify Goals: What do you hope to learn? Pain points? Emotions? Workarounds?

Running the Role Play

Act It Out: Walk through the task as realistically as possible. Stay in character.
Narrate Feelings:– Pause to voice what the “customer” feels (“This step feels confusing.”).
Iterate: Replay with variations (different personas, contexts, or constraints).
Observe & Record: Note where frustration, delay, or improvisation appears.

Key Questions

Where did confusion, hesitation, or frustration occur?
What emotions surfaced (stress, delight, boredom)?
Which workarounds did the “customer” invent?
What surprised you compared to your expectations?

Note

Common Confusion:

It’s not acting class — the goal is empathy, not performance.
Don’t design solutions yet — focus on experiencing the pain, not fixing it.
Props don’t have to be perfect — rough stand-ins are enough to trigger insight.

Afterward

Debrief as a team — What did we learn? What new hypotheses emerged?
Compare with real observations — do the pains match what customers actually experience?
Capture quotes, sketches, and surprises immediately before memory fades.

For a practical checklist to use in the field, see the “Role Play Guide” in the Experimentation Toolkit.