Improving the user experience in Theater
Part I
How many times have you heard the word Covid-19 by now? Millions of times I guess…
Every article you read nowadays is about the disease and how is affecting all fields, and of course, performing arts is one of those sectors that have been affected.
However, theaters have been always in crisis. This is why my team (formed by Diana, Ana, Ángel and I) started this project after questioning ourselves: how can we improve the user experience in theater, and Design Thinking seemed to be the right methodology to get to work.
What did we know about theater? How could we improve it? There was so much work to do, so we organized all the tasks we needed to complete in a Gantt chart (a timeline diagram). We had two weeks to come up with the best idea to test. Do you want to know what was that?
Let’s get down to work!
Design Thinking is a process for creative problem-solving, so we decided to use this methodology to find the best solution to our problem.
This process is represented in the image below by The Double Diamond, a model divided into four phases: discover, define, develop, and deliver.
The two diamonds represent a process of exploring an issue by divergent thinking, that means, in a wider or deeper way and then by convergent thinking, taking focused action.
1. Discover
When we first started this challenge, we realized we knew so little about theater, so to be off with a good start our Research phase, we decided to make a SWOT analysis (in Spanish called DAFO as the abbreviation of Weakness, Threats, Strengths, and Opportunities in this order) after reading the briefing.
Once we had some common ground, we formulated our research questions divided by its relation with the users, the stakeholders, the product itself, or the competitors. It was like brainstorming but instead of getting ideas, we got questions to research about.
We got so many questions we had to vote the most interesting ones by dotmocracy (voting with dots) so we could start organizing how were we going to investigate all those questions. We were open about the techniques, so we chose different ways to research the same question. The chosen techniques were: benchmark, interviews, questionnaires, netnography, and desk research.
Questionnaire
With no doubts, we got revealing information with our questionnaire.
We made it as broader as possible but focusing on the user and his/her relation with the theater, so we could get more information about the three types of users we thought we could get in just one survey.
We divided the questionnaire by people who like Theater, people who don’t like, and people who don’t really care about it.
In the first type of user, we focused on the things they liked the most about it, if they would watch this scenic art in streaming or if they would be sponsors.
With the second type, we wanted to check if the reason was that people think it’s boring if it was because of the price (it didn’t seem so) or because they just rather watch another type of performing arts or activities (by majority they mostly prefer to watch movies or go to the cinema).
In the third type of user, we were surprised by the answer of what would it make to change your mind about going to the theater. 61% said they would go more often if their social environment went.
Interviews
This technique was the preferred one thanks to all the common information and insights we got.
We made 6 interviews with different people related to the theater, all of them were strongly involved with this area: three actors (two professionals actress and one amateur actor), a theater director, the deputy director of La Joven (a theater company), and an amateur user.
They all agreed on the same points:
Theater needs a professionalization
The physicality of this performing art is irreplaceable.
The theater is not a common social activity among teens.
The lack of promotion in the educational system.
Theater helps people shape the way they know themselves, and they interact with others.
Some of the most revealing verbatims we got were:
- “Theater is really important in the children development”
- “Right now education is really tight, you are required to do certain things like everyone else and not thinking outside the box. I believe the creative world is very personal and rewarding”
- “Introducing theater into school would make people attend more theatre performances”
- “It’s important to know who you are talking to and use the same code to communicate”
2. Define
Once we put in common all the information extracted from the opinion surveys and the interviews, we got our user personas.
We decided to focus on three main users: the teenager who doesn’t go to the theater because his social circle doesn’t go, the actor who wants to make theater his way of living but needs to have a second job for economic support and the director woman who wants to go further in her career by promoting her work internationally and also thinks theater should be present at school.
After having our three users, we thought it would be great for our project to make them all interact in the same scenario with our product (in this case, the theater as a performing art).
We proposed the following scenario:
Manuel, who lives in Burgos, a small city in Spain, has a school excursion to Madrid with his high schoolmates and teachers. They need to attend to a theatre play directed by Silvia in which Saúl is performing.
The main point is that Manuel has no interest in the play at the beginning, then he likes it, but then he feels frustrated when his friends are laughing and not paying attention to the play at all.
To create this user journey made us realize we needed to focus on solving the problem from the bottom. If there’s a culture of consuming theatre among kids and young people, it would have a higher impact on society.
And here we completed the first diamond, finding an opportunity to our problem. If you want to know all the about the solution and the process I urge you to keep reading! Improving the user experience in Theater Part II
