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3. “Scenarios are stories.They are
stories about people and their
activities.” (John M. Carroll)
(Carroll, 1999)
4. Scenario’s elements
• Setting — description of the starting state of the
episode and objects that are involved
• Actors
• Goals
• Actions — things that actors do
• Events — things that happen to actors
• Objects
(Carroll, 1999)
5. Goals
Harry is interested in bridge failures; as a child, he saw a
small bridge collapse when its footings were undermined after a
heavy rainfall.
He opens the case study of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and
requests to see the film of its collapse. He is stunned to see
the bridge first sway, then ripple, and ultimately lurch apart.
He quickly replays the film, and then opens the associated
course module on harmonic motion.
He browses the material (without doing the exercises), saves
the film clip in his workbook with a speech annotation, and
then enters a natural language query to find pointers to other
physical manifestations of harmonic motion.
He moves on to a case study involving flutes and piccolos.
(Carroll, 1999)
6. Actions
Harry is interested in bridge failures; as a child, he saw a
small bridge collapse when its footings were undermined after a
heavy rainfall.
He opens the case study of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and
requests to see the film of its collapse. He is stunned to see
the bridge first sway, then ripple, and ultimately lurch apart.
He quickly replays the film, and then opens the associated
course module on harmonic motion.
He browses the material (without doing the exercises), saves
the film clip in his workbook with a speech annotation, and
then enters a natural language query to find pointers to other
physical manifestations of harmonic motion.
He moves on to a case study involving flutes and piccolos.
(Carroll, 1999)
7. Objects
Harry is interested in bridge failures; as a child, he saw a
small bridge collapse when its footings were undermined after a
heavy rainfall.
He opens the case study of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and
requests to see the film of its collapse. He is stunned to see
the bridge first sway, then ripple, and ultimately lurch apart.
He quickly replays the film, and then opens the associated
course module on harmonic motion.
He browses the material (without doing the exercises), saves
the film clip in his workbook with a speech annotation, and
then enters a natural language query to find pointers to other
physical manifestations of harmonic motion.
He moves on to a case study involving flutes and piccolos.
(Carroll, 1999)
8. Scenario types
• Problem scenarios — describe current situation
features (what users can do)
• Activity scenarios — propose transformation from
current practice into new design features
• Information scenarios — how users perceive,
interpret and make sense of information
• Interaction scenarios — physical actions and
system responses that enact and respond to the
users’ task goals and needs
(Rosson & Carroll, 2002; Palotta, 2007)
9. Five reasons for scenario-based
design
• Vivid descriptions of end-user experiences evoke reflection
about design issues
• Scenarios concretely fix an interpretation and a solution,
but are open-ended and easily revised
• Scenarios can be written at multiple levels, from many
perspectives and for many purposes
• Scenarios can be abstracted and categorized
• Scenarios anchor design discussion in work, supporting
participation among stakeholders and appropriate design
outcomes
(Carroll, 1999)
11. Scenario 1: First experience with EduFeedr
John is teaching an open online course where he has more than 30
participants. All the participants have their individual blogs where they
publish the weekly assignment. John is using a feed reader to follow all the
student blogs. He is also trying to comment all the posts that have an
inspiring ideas.
In the middle of the course John notices that it becomes increasingly
complicated to manage the course. Several participants are not able to keep
up with the tempo of the course. In the feed reader it is not easy to see
how far different participants have proceeded with the course.
One day John reads about new feed reader EduFeedr that has special features
to support online courses. It an online feed reader similar to Google
Reader. John creates an account and starts exploring the possibilities. He
can easily import all the feeds from his current feed reader.
After importing the feeds he notices that the students’ posts are somehow
grouped by the assignments. This way it is easy to see how far the
participants have proceeded with their work.
It is possible to browse students posts by a tag cloud. Among other tags
there is a tag "urgent". John clicks on the tag and finds out that a few
students who needed fast feedback to proceed with their home task have used
that tag.
There is also an image that displays the social network between the student
blogs. John can see which blogs are more actively linked and commented.
John is impressed by these possibilities. He decides to get a cup of coffee
and explore the other features of EduFeedr.
12. Participatory design sessions
• 2...3 participants and 1 designer
• Structured discussion about 3...4 scenarios
• Prepared questions about the scenarios
• Should not last more than 2 hours
13. Example questions
• Did the scenario wake-up any thoughts?
• Could you image yourself to the role of the
teacher?
• Is there something you would like to change in the
scenario?
14. References
• Carroll, J.M. (1999). Five Reasons for Scenario-Based Design. In: Proceedings of
the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
• Rosson, B.M., Carroll, J.M. (2002). Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based
Development of Human Computer Interaction. London: Academic Press.
• Palotta,V. (2007). Scenario-Based Design. http://diuf.unifr.ch/pai/uc/
miscellaneous/Scenario-based_Design.pdf
15. Photos
• Teemu Leinonen, http://lemill.org/trac/attachment/wiki/DesignSessionResults/
finland-02.jpg
