Back to Phase 1: Research & Discovery
User scenarios are essentially short expositions, used to explore why a specific user or user group would use your system within a narrow context and purpose. They detail the user’s motivations, goals and concerns, and are perfect setups for journey maps. When comparing different scenarios that have the same user goals, opportunities for the system to be more helpful in accomplishing those goals can be discovered.
Use scenarios to explore how users might approach your system in specific contexts or environments. This exploration should foster insight into ways to optimize the system for these scenarios, thus increasing the value your system offers its users.
Scenarios are typically written as simple prose, like the start of a short story. They form the input for user journey maps, where the scenario can be played out and interactions with your system can be explored. Scenarios should also become the foundation of your concept testing and usability testing – having your test participants attempt to accomplish the goals laid out in your scenarios is an effective method of design validation.
Tim is preparing to report at the quarterly WSR on his weapon system’s availability in the previous quarter. When doing this analysis previously, he’s relied on downloading ESR data then importing it into a spreadsheet created years ago by a colleague. This quarter, however, his CO has told him his analysis needs to go further and identify the 10 maintenance issues most limiting overall availability and at what locations they are most frequently occurring. This has Tim worried, as he doesn’t believe he can break down the data and prepare it for presentation in the time he has before the conference.”