A Mocumentary is a fictional but documentary style video interview with an imagined user persona. Using script writers and actors can really help bring a persona to life and enable clients or designers to understand users lives or the impact of news services on a very personal level.

Why? It is a useful tool to use when it is not possible to interview or film the real lives of actual users. This could be because of access issues, you want to imagine an extreme-use case scenario or a user in a future setting.

For our ‘Digital Britain’ scenario planning project in the BBC, we created documentary style video interviews and fictional reports written by key characters living in the future, who reflected on life in 2014 and key events of the decade.