PUTTING SCENARIOS TO WORK DURING ENVISIONING

Ron Gagnier

User Experience Design Consultant and Design Educator

StruggleDesign is sometimes a

ComplexityDesign involves great

Don’t Blame the Tools

Frame of ReferenceDesign is about

Delivering ValueDesign is about

Use a Scenario Understand the Users, Goals, Tasks

Use a real industry problem, anecdote, story• Who are the users?

• Job profiles, interviews

• What are their goals?• What tasks support their goals?

Make up an industry problem, anecdote, story• Who are the supposed users?

• Job profiles, interviews

• What are their supposed goals?• What tasks support their goals?

Actual

Strawman

Scenario

Tommy’s Coffee – Regional Manager

Sally the district sales manager for Tommy’s Coffee is planning her visit schedule to Ottawa where she will visit various stores in the franchise. She has limited time and cannot visit all the stores so she needs to understand if stores are missing their targets. As per company policy she must have face to face discussions with the store manager when targets are missed.

For every face to face discussion she must prepare by understanding the potential causes and have some recommendations ready in the event the manager is not already addressing the issue.

Sally launches her company application and views an overview of the Ottawa region. She is able to see at a glance how the 20+ stores are tracking against their targets. She can see that 2 stores are tracking behind this months targets. She decides to focus on the Elgin St. store to see it’s details to understand what might be affecting its revenue

She opens the Elgin St. store to see all pertinent metrics. For example she sees that: • customer-traffic is good• beverage sale is good, • Food sales are nominal• Revenue is down• staff training is down• $/customer visit is down

She makes a few notes directly on the Elgin metrics and decides to shift her view to look at a seasonal analysis for Elgin, following a hunch that maybe Elgin is always down in Q3? She quickly can tell that her hunch is wrong; for past 3 years Elgin met Q3 targets

She decides to look at the amount of customer traffic for the Elgin store and quickly sees traffic is unchanged seasonally so is not likely to be the culprit.

She decides she will look at a breakdown of revenue by product – again no specific product is dragging revenue down although food sales are flat. She makes some more notes or annotations on what she has checked to go over with her Elgin manager at their face to face discussion (this becomes a bookmark or waypoint for her face-to-face discussion) (Note: “Ask the Store manager about up-selling – why aren’t all his staff trained on up-selling?”)

User Context

User Goals

User Tasks

Build One!

How do I Build a Scenario? Understand the Users, Goals, Tasks

Use a real industry problem, anecdote, story• Who are the users?

• Job profiles, interviews

• What are their goals?• What tasks support their goals?

Make up an industry problem, anecdote, story• Who are the supposed users?

• Job profiles, interviews

• What are their supposed goals?• What tasks support their goals?

Actual

Strawman

Scenario

How do I Build a Scenario? Context Template

• Industry:• ?

• Company: • ?

• Main Character: • ?

• Goals:• ?

Tommy’s Coffee - Regional ManagerJob Artifacts

• Look at job postings to understand the skills, responsibilities and education to perform that role

• What tools, techniques and artifacts are needed in order to achieve the goal today?

• How much effort & time is involved? • Is there room for improvement?• What obstacles exist?

How do I Build a Scenario? As is… vs. Future State

As is…• Scenario written to depict the short-comings of today’s solutions• Discusses the steps & artifacts that comprise a solution & how they occur

Future State…• Scenario written to depict the future state or outcome that satisfies a user

goal• Discusses the steps & artifacts that comprise a solution (not how they occur)

Preferred

Write it up!

Use the ScenarioDesign Envisioning

For each goal brainstorm ways to achieve it!

Explore many concepts…

Sketches Wireframes Concept Walkthroughs Low Fidelity Prototypes

How?

What’s Not in a Scenario?• Don’t specify action details

• No: Sally taps the graph on the tablet screen to zoom in to the details• Yes: Sally zooms into the details on the graph

• Don’t specify implementation details• No: Sally loads the data from the XJ6 data appliance by running the data conversion algorithm….• Yes: Sally loads the data