It's 3:00 p.m., do you know where your users are?

In this post, I wanted to briefly discuss one specific aspect of how using scenarios as an integral part of your design process can give you insight into user needs that you might not discover otherwise.

I've already written here in the past about the idea of scenario-based design in general, which is the concept of using narrative stories to represent your user's perspective of a vision of future use of the product or service you're designing. These scenarios serve as a basis for all of your design efforts, assuming you've done the due diligence of conducting user research; the key is to base your scenarios on research to make sure they credibly represent your users accomplishing things they actually care about.

Many times, in the work I do, clients want to skip the process of creating scenarios, instead saying they already have use cases, and why not just use those to save time and money. While use cases do lay out specific interactions of users (or actors in use case lingo), they do so in a very system-centric way, just stating what action a user takes, and what information may have moved between the user and the system. Rather than this system-centric perspective, scenarios are literally rich stories capturing the lived experience of your users...from their perspective (this is really important)...this is why good research matters. Lack of good research will yield scenarios that are just made up, that don't really capture credible futures.

One big benefit of doing this is that you start to get a better sense of where and when your users are while using your product. In many cases, scenarios will include details such as "It's 9:45 p.m. on a rainy Friday night, and John just pulled into his driveway after a particularly tiring week. All he wants to do is grab a beer, put up his feet, and watch whatever baseball game is on. But, first he needs to get that expense report submitted; if he doesn't do it tonight, he won't get reimbursed for another three weeks. He would have done it at work, but he left some of the receipts he needs at home." At first, these types of details may seem trivial, but they really do matter for your design process.

A few years ago, I was working on a project that was going to result in a new design for a customer relationship management system, whose users were responsible for staying in touch with customers, all day long. The client already had many requirements and ideas for features, and even some screen designs before we even became involved. The first thing we did of course was user research. After just 5 or 6 interviews, we started to see a pattern emerge where many of the users were usually running between customer meetings, spending all of their time either at a customer site, or in a taxi on the way to the next customer site. So, why did this matter? Well, most of the client's ideas for the new system were based on an assumption that the users were sitting at their desk in their office using a large monitor. What was instead needed were solutions that would allow users to use their mobile devices to quickly create notes from a meeting they just got out of, and send them to members of their team in time to get to the next customer meeting, all while sitting in a taxi. In this case, understanding where the user actually was had a huge impact on the design outcome.

You might think that this information would have been discovered in due time regardless, because it's just so obvious. But I've seen so many cases where companies have their final design ready to implement, and there are usually still many of these "obvious" issues still undiscovered.

Where and when a customer is are exactly the types of details that you should capture in your design process; and capturing them in scenarios is a great way to make sure your design team doesn't forget about all of these details that can make or break your final design, in terms of really fitting into your user's lives in useful ways.

So, do you know where your users are right now?