Bodystorming
How providing perspective to your designing process can enhance user experience
While settling a debate or an argument, you’ll often hear someone urge others to “step into their shoes” to wholly comprehend the situation. But what does it really mean? More importantly, how can one apply this method while designing a solution to a pressing problem? One way to do this effectively is by using a technique called ‘Bodystorming.’
Also known as Embodied Designing, Bodystorming is an immersive approach that allows researchers or designers to subject themselves physically in a situation and come up with solutions that satisfy users’ needs. In other words, “Bodystorming is simply brainstorming, but done with the body.” It combines the process of brainstorming with role-playing, creating an entirely new method that forces researchers or designers to get out of their workstations and compels them to design solutions by mimicking the user’s environment. For instance: While designing seats of a bus, Bodystorming can help us to understand how passengers with varying heights and ages will experience different seats. It can also help in determining the amount of space that needs to be allocated for the overhead luggage compartments.
How does it work?
Typically, a designer follows a 4-part process of inquiring and analyzing, developing ideas, creating a solution, and evaluating the solution based on their work environment. Bodystorming requires them to “think outside the box,” in our case, their workstations, and design solutions that simulate the user’s context. The technique can be used during the initial stages of the designing process to empathize with the users. You can practice Bodystorming in three simple steps —
Step 1: Observe
“You see, but you do not observe” — Arthur Conan Doyle.
Before starting up on a solution right away, designers or researchers need to first understand the user problem with utmost clarity. But, this cannot be understood by simply brainstorming in conference rooms. The best, most cost-effective, way of doing this is to observe users in their environment. In our scenario, to understand how comfortable the bus seats are, we need to see people of different heights and ages use them. Some questions to look for could be —
● Are passengers comfortable in their seats?
● Is there sufficient leg space between two seats?
● Is the luggage compartment big enough for carry-on bags?
Step 2: Immerse yourself
To completely understand a user problem, designers or researchers need to immerse themselves in the situation and act accordingly. They can also hire participants and prepare a script for them to use in a particular use case. Designers can provide props that will be available to the user’s environment for better results. By simply engaging themselves and others in the process, designers can produce ideas, act them out, gather feedback, and reiterate rapidly.
Step 3: Reflect and reiterate
After enacting the scenario, researchers or designers can ask participants to reflect on their experience and find any flaws or insufficiency in the product. The process will provide researchers with more clarity on the situation by empathizing with users which will allow them to craft solutions best suited for the users.
Here’s a short video by Innovation Catalyst, Tom Maiorana, explaining how Bodystorming can be used to understand user problems and formulate innovative, real-time solutions.
Advantages
- High level of empathy — As Bodystorming aims to understand multiple user problems at once, it employs a high level of empathy to deal with users and form a coherent, all-pervasive solution.
- Short feedback loop — This technique allows designers to rapidly try out multiple ideas and gain real-time insights, resulting in shorter feedback loops that help them to fail fast.
- Promotes playful thinking — Bodystorming is also known as ‘creativity thinking’ and as such introduces playfulness into the designing process.
Disadvantages
- Expensive and time-consuming — This approach can be quite costly, depending on your user’s environment and the product. Since you have to act out an entire interaction which can take hours, it can get pretty time-intensive.
- Undesirable results — Bodystorming can often produce unsatisfactory outcomes for introverted and shy participants as they won’t feel comfortable opening up to the entire experience.
- Sensitive in nature — If the test deals with sensitive test subjects like children or elders, designers or researchers need to take great care to ensure the environment’s safety. Moreover, participants may modify some aspects of their behaviour in response to the awareness of being watched, which can significantly affect the outcome.
