Scenario of use

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Introduction and definitions

Scenarios of use describe what a person does with a system from the user's point of view. The opposite analysis is use case, a description of what users can do with a system from the system's point of view.

“A scenario is a short story about a specific user with a specific goal at your site. Scenarios are the questions, tasks, and stories that users bring to your Web site and that the Web site must satisfy. Scenarios are critical both for designing Web sites and for doing usability testing.” (usability.gov, retrieved April 27 2011.

See also Personas, since scenarios of use are often integrated with persona files.

Links

Introductions

• Scenarios at Information & Design, (2011).
• Accessibility in User-Centered Design: Scenarios and Example Scenarios by Shawn Lawton, the author of "Just Ask".
• Create Scenarios at usability.gov
• Scenarios at Fluid project (verbal scenarios)
• Scenarios and storyboards at Fluid project (structured scenarios)

Special topics

• Scenarios in Practice, by Paul McInerney, Michael J. Muller, IBM Watson Research Center, Summary of a CHI 03 workshop. (abstract/ TR2003-13.pdf PDF Report)

Collections of links

• Scenarios at Dey Alexander Group