Anticipating user's needs with playful methods

We are interested to improve the process of innovative design with playful methods and tools used by the design teams. We tested the Persona method which is considered as fun, with a playful technological support, namely an Interactive Tabletop system, in an industrial project. Twenty-four participants (15 men and 9 women, aged 22 to 37) specialized in engineering design, formalized user requirements for an ambient device in one of the following conditions: Persona method used on Post It notes and Persona method used on Tabletop system. Our results show that the Tabletop condition is the more effective regarding quantity, originality, usefulness and technical feasibility of the ideas generated. These results suggest that the fun of this condition (Persona on Tabletop) is likely to improve the performance of the design team.