Scenarios in user-centred design—setting the stage for reflection and action

TLDR

Scenarios are used to balance reflection and action, typical and critical, plus and minus situations, offering a creative alternative to conventional usability approaches that prioritize generalised user actions. The paper presents three scenario examples, demonstrates how specific scenarios—especially those highlighting critical or caricatured situations—can foster creativity, and recommends tailoring and selecting scenarios to fit particular design purposes. The authors show that depicting critical or caricatured situations helps user and designer groups generate creative solutions.

Abstract

This paper discusses three examples of use of scenarios in user-centred design. Common to the examples are the use of scenarios to support the tensions between reflection and action, between typical and critical situations, and between plus and minus situations. The paper illustrates how a variety of more specific scenarios emphasising, e.g. critical situations, or even caricatures of situations are very useful for helping groups of users and designers being creative in design. Emphasising creativity in design is a very different view on the design process than normally represented in usability work or software/requirement engineering, where generalising users' actions are much more important than, in this paper, the suggested richness of and contradiction between actual use situations. In general the paper proposes to attune scenarios to the particular purposes of the situations they are to be used in, and to be very selective based on these purposes.