SCENARIOS

Scenarios are stories about examples of use of your site or application.

▪ “A scenario is a short story about a specific user with a specific goal at your

site. Scenarios are the questions, tasks, and stories that users bring to your

Web site and that the Web site must satisfy. Scenarios are critical both for

designing Web sites and for doing usability testing.” From Usability.gov

▪ “A description sufficiently detailed so that design implications can be inferred.”

From J.M. Carroll

Focuses on user's “stories”

▪ What they want to do

▪ Why

▪ What they expect

These are based on the stories you heard during data gathering. They are

examples of realistic interactions with the interface you are designing.

User Scenarios Help Keep Designs User-Centered

User scenarios are valuable aids for designers to visualize aspects of their solutions

which users might appreciate most in their contexts of use and with their unique

needs and motivations.

Sometimes confused with user stories (short statements that specifically describe a

user’s goal), scenarios  explicitly capture what users would likely experience as they

proceed toward using an ideal solution.

These storytelling-powered deliverables are therefore flexible tools for ideation,

iteration and usability testing, where they can help expose vital areas to test. As user

scenarios help teams explore the design space and locate precise and hard-to-

notice user needs, they can also keep stakeholders on track with a shared vision.

In a process such as design thinking, design teams systematically work to account

for the most common use case and work to create a reliable narrative to use as a

guide. To ideate toward accurate pictures of your users, their world and how your

solution might solve their problems best, you begin by doing user research. Then,

you create personas to represent your target users and flesh out their experiences to

reflect realistic situations.

So, to have the ingredients for a user scenario, you first must clearly define the

following factors:

Background – who are your users (including their knowledge base and skillset/s)?

Motivations – what goals do they want to achieve?

Tasks – what must they do to reach those goals?

Context of use – how will they encounter your design?

Environment – where will they try to use it?

Challenges – when they try to use it, what can get in their way (e.g., signal loss)?
Personas usually contain a scenario or story as part of the description.

Tips for Creating Compelling User Scenarios

You can create user scenarios as highly visual narratives or storyboards with

pictures of the personas you’re modelling them on. Essential points to consider

include these:

Provide the context of:

Who – details of the persona.

What their goals are.

When they might perform tasks (including obstacles).

Where they might do these (including obstacles).

Why they want to do things, must perform subtasks, etc.

Focus on the bigger picture but keep to the point – include the circumstances leading

up to the interaction, the factors that impact the user’s world and that might influence

how they interact with a solution (e.g., cultural context) and anything they may need

before encountering or using the solution (e.g., information).

Make the scenario understandable for people who don’t have technical

backgrounds – so everyone, including stakeholders, can get on board with elements

they can easily relate to and can stay open-minded about necessary processes, etc.

Keep user scenarios tightly centered on the users themselves – to ensure any ideas

about design features stay grounded in the reality of the users’ context.

This is an example of the beginning of a storyboard for an app that motivates people

to workout at work. The full version would have more slides that detail how the app

works and how it motivates the users.

Here’s an example of a user scenario:

“Jeremy, 52, a senior manager for a medical supplies company, needs constantly

updated information on purchasing-related issues while he travels between work and

hospital sites so he can use/allocate resources optimally. He’s highly skilled,

organized and diligent. However, with recent layoffs he now struggles to manage his

workload and is too drained to enjoy his career. He strains to handle tasks which his

former assistant previously performed, stay current with issues and investigate

supply-chain problems, while he tries to find alternatives that would be more

economical in the financial climate.

He wants something convenient like an app to take him straight to only the most

relevant updates and industry news, including current information feeds about share

prices, tariffs on foreign suppliers, budget decisions in local hospitals and

innovations in the medical devices he handles (mostly lung and cardiovascular

products). Instead of continuing to liaise with three other managers and spending an

hour generating one end-of-day report through the company intranet, he’d love to

have all the information he needs securely on his smartphone and be able to easily

send real-time screenshots for junior staff to action and file and corporate heads to

examine and advise him about.”