Designing with Scenarios

Design

Does your team struggle with developing or prioritizing requirements? Do you have difficulty getting stakeholders to think beyond their organizational silos to consider the end-to-end user experience? Do you sometimes wonder how to connect the dots between your user research and the design in a persuasive way?

If so, scenarios may be just the tool for you. Like use cases and agile user stories, scenarios describe sequential interaction. Unlike those other tools, though, scenarios rely on the generative and persuasive power of storytelling, which is perhaps the most natural creation and communication medium there is.

Based on a deep understanding of what makes your "characters" tick, this workshop will show you how to develop compelling stories, then use those stories to visualize a new experience, from cross-channel interaction down to screen design. Specific topics include how to:

• Relate scenarios to use cases and user stories
• Decide when to use scenarios during your design process
• Develop effective scenarios
• Use journey mapping to help you build better scenarios
• Generate requirements from scenarios
• Use scenarios to group functionality and information
• Storyboard coherent flow with scenarios
• Use scenarios for detailed design decisions, such as visual hierarchy

Throughout the session, we'll use plenty of examples and hands-on exercises.

Journey mapping as insight tool: a healthcare case study

If you want a team to see the world through users' eyes, there's nothing quite as powerful as involving them in ethnographic field studies. However, teams can still struggle with translating their field experience into product features and design decisions. Journey maps help teams structure and share field data, identify opportunities, and determine what kinds of tools and information to offer and when.

The talk is illustrated with field data and a map of the patient journey through serious illness, based on recent work with PatientsLikeMe.com.