In today’s exercise, you will be practicing and developing your ability to conduct the deliberate search in a movie theater.
The Workout
- Using the photo above as something to jog your memory of a movie theater, identify all of the baseline (non-violent) personas present inside of a movie theater and what their purpose/intention is for being there.
- Write your answers on a sheet of paper before viewing our answers
- Add a comment with the assessments that you made, but that we didn’t make, so that we can check for those assessments and provide feedback on those specific observations. We will add them to our answers in the post itself for future viewings of the exercise.
View Our Answers
- Movie Goers: People in the theater to attend a scheduled movie showing.
- Movie Theater Staff: People there to run the theater’s operations: take tickets, work the concessions stand or clean the theater.
- “The Peruser”: The person seeing what movie titles are available and what time shows are, but without having decided what they will watch.
- “The Ride”: A person not attending the movie, but waiting near the lobby area for a movie goer once their movie ends.
Enhance The Workout
- Repeat
- The goal for this exercise was to improve your ability to conduct mental simulations for places you are about to visit, so for each of the personas you expect to see in a movie theater, go back and picture them doing their jobs.
- Where are they standing?
- What are they wearing?
- What is their behavior like?
- The goal for this exercise was to improve your ability to conduct mental simulations for places you are about to visit, so for each of the personas you expect to see in a movie theater, go back and picture them doing their jobs.
- Reflect
- Consider any personas that you missed and diagnose why you think you made the error.
- By conducting a self-driven failure analysis, you can:
- Identify gaps in your understanding of what types of people make places “work.”
- Identify if you have natural trends towards rushing through simulations and missing key components through lack of attention.
- Act
- Identify a movie theater where you can make this observation in real time to solidify today’s exercise with personal experience both in your professional life and personal life. Go to that area and practice making the assessment.
- When you are walking into another store this week, spend a moment in the parking lot to repeat this exercises before entering and check for similarities.
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