Scenario based design

Ebba Þóra Hvannbergebba@hi.is

Objective

• Understanding, Envisionment, Design and Evaluation

• Scenario based process• Develop scenarios and personas

Design is a mess

Remember, design is messy; designers try to understand this mess. They observe how their products will be used; design is about users and use.They visualize which is the act of desciding what it is.

Kelly og Hartfield (1996), p. 156

Understanding

• Understanding is concerned with what the system has to do, what it has to be like and how it has to fit in with other things; with the requirements of the product, system or service.

• Designers need to research the range of people, activities and contexts relevant to the domain they are investigating so that they can understand the requirements of the system they are developing.

• They need to understand the opportunities and constraints provided by technologies.

Understanding

• Non-functional requirements. Of what qualities is the system delivered to the user. Examples are safety, performance, usability, robustness.

Designing – in the mind

• Conceptual design – Activities and data – At the abstract conceptual stage – Try to focus on what the system does and not how

it is implemented

Seen from the domain

Monk, A. and Howard, S. (1998) The rich picture: a tool for reasoning about work context, Interactions, 5(2), pp. 21-30

Seen from the designer

Monk, A. and Howard, S. (1998) The rich picture: a tool for reasoning about work context, Interactions, 5(2), pp. 21-30

Designing – in material

• Transform of conceptual design into concrete, accurate design

• Functional desing, i.e. how everything works and how data is organized and stored. – What are the steps in a process, what data flows

between steps– What events trigger other events or activities

Design – in material

• Presentation design – Colours, shapes, styles, aesthetics– Has influence on people’s emotions

• Interaction design – What does the system do and what does the

human do– Interaction between human and machine

Envisionment of design

• Hvernig sjáum við hönnunina fyrir okkur• Verðum að velja rétta miðilinn til að sjá fyrir

okkur hvernig hönnunin lítur út

• Dæmi um miðla eru t.d. rissmyndir, einfaldar frumgerðir, teiknimyndasögur (sjá t.d. Comiclife), sviðssetningar, 3víddar teikningar

Evaluation

• How good is the design – With respect to needs and requirements

• How good is the implementation – With respect to the design and the requirements

• There is an evaluation at all stages • We need to select the appropriate method for

each evaluation

Implementation of design

• Software design • Database system • Programming • Testing programs

Personas and scenarios

• Persona – Some persona is created. It will get a name, age,

position and other personal characteristics, information on the past, dreams and intentions.

• Scenarios– Stories about people who are performing an

activity in a certain context with the help of technology.

J. M. Carroll, Five reasons for scenario-based design, Interacting with Computers, Volume 13, Issue 1, September 2000, Pages 43-60

Scenarios in design

• User stories are real-world experiences, ideas, anecdotes and knowledge of people. Can be videos, diaries, photographs, etc. People’s stories are rich in context and have trivial details.

• Conceptual scenarios are more abstract than stories. Much of the context is stripped away.

• Concrete scenario is the beginning of material desing and division of roles and functions between people and devices

Scenarios in design

• Use cases describe the roles of human and machine in design

Challenge

• For the point of sale of the motorway cafe each team member to write:– A persona – A user story– A conceptual scenario– A concrete scenario– A use case