If you want to authentically engage and make a lasting impact, you need to get at the heart of a person’s lived experience.

This is the heart of the design thinking process. This process has been used by businesses for who knows how long, and anyone–social workers, educators, students and more–can use this process.

In fact, design thinking helped me fall back in love with the Reproductive Justice movement because I was rapidly burning out. I wanted another way to remain engaged in the movement, and wanted to reenter the movement from another angle. Being introduced to design thinking by CoreAlign and the American Evaluation Association  a few years ago was the answer.

In short, design thinking (which came out of the Design School at Stanford University), is a structured approach to generating ideas by getting into the mind of of the audience you’re trying to reach.

We’re designers, in one form or another. Teachers develop class curricula based in district expectations and well as students’ learning styles. Social workers and others in the helping professions create evidence-based interventions that meet the needs of the populations they work with. Businesses create products based on user feedback. The best way to make something better is by going to the source.

Here’s the process:

The first step in the design thinking process is discovering why the audience does what they do, their physical and emotional needs, their worldview, and what’s meaningful to them. This is the most important step in the process because in order to create a solution, you must identify why finding a solution matters to them.

It’s having a conversation, and it moves people from being statistics to names and faces. Having conversations with the intended user and observing them in their environment allows you to see behaviors within the context of  their lived experience. Insights from these conversations hones into what really matters from their perspective. Oftentimes, we think we know what the problems are, and we create programs, services, and initiatives that aren’t successful because the voices of the people we’re wanting to reach weren’t involved in the process.

I’ll go into depth of each part of the design thinking process later, but today we’re going to use a tool that allows you to to get at the heart of a person’s lived experience: The User Persona.

What’s The User Persona?

The User Persona isn’t one person. It’s a composite of a specific group.

Let’s say you want to create a process that helps nonprofit staff integrate the Reproductive Justice framework into their organization’s programming. You’ve had conversations with staff at various levels of understanding of RJ. Gather your information in a variety of ways, including:

• Age
• Location
• Important identifiers to the user (relationships status, children, school, race/ethnicity, work, etc.)
• Intersted insights (that can be turned into quotes that illustrate an important aspect of their experience)
• Personality traits
• Motivations
• Points of View
• Pain points and challenges
• Hopes and dreams
• Attitudes towards using a program, service or product

The information you gather should be from people who are polar opposites, as well as people who are similar. This is because intended users can be alike but vary in important ways, particularly when it comes to their points of view.

Here’s an example

(The quote comes from the RJ survey I conducted in November-December 2016, by the way.)

This example is “Nicole”, a nonprofit worker that works at a nonprofit that provides services for formally incarcerated women. Remember that we want to have a diverse poll of experiences to gather from. Who else would you have a conversation with at Nicole’s job that’s different from her? You can start with her supervisor or a participant in her weekly group meeting.

Key Take Aways 

Creating user personas helps you get at the heart of a person’s lived experiences as it provides first-hand experiences of particular needs and situations the intended user of your program, service, or campaign may find themselves in. Most importantly, user personas give a reference point for predicting how (and how well) a program, service, or campaign may work for particular user. As you engage with people, think about:

• How might this person experience this?
• How will the person’s characteristics, values, daily life, etc. impact how they experience this?
• How might this person experience any challenges while using this?
• What modifications would you need to make after this person experiences this?

Creating User Personas helps you gauge how someone might access, benefit from, and participate in the program or service, and it allows you to evaluate how the process is going. The best part? It humanizes what you do.