UX Australia 2011

Wednesday 24 August. Full day workshop.

Description

Does your team struggle with developing or prioritizing requirements? Do you have difficulty getting stakeholders to think beyond their organizational silos to consider the end-to-end user experience? Do you sometimes wonder how to connect the dots between your user research and the design in a persuasive way?

If so, scenarios may be just the tool for you. Like use cases and agile user stories, scenarios describe sequential interaction. Unlike those other tools, though, scenarios rely on the generative and persuasive power of storytelling, which is perhaps the most natural creation and communication medium there is.

Based on a deep understanding of what makes your “characters” tick, this workshop will show you how to develop compelling stories, then use those stories to drive requirements and design.

Workshop structure

After a quick overview of where scenarios fit in typical design and development processes, we’ll spend a little time on an essential storytelling element: strong characters (in the form of data-driven personas). We’ll spend the rest of the morning on developing context scenarios: ambitious, generative tools you can use to envision a future product or an entire cross-channel experience.

We’ll start the afternoon with identifying and prioritizing key requirements based on scenarios and goals. From there, we’ll storyboard and sketch the key interaction pathways using more detailed scenarios. You’ll see how a series of scenarios starring different personas can help you balance divergent user needs. The day will end with discussion of using scenarios to persuade stakeholders or even run early ideas past users.

Throughout the day, we’ll use examples and hands-on exercises, including both an ambitious service design problem and a more constrained product design.

Outcomes

Participants will:

• Understand how scenarios differ from use cases and user stories, as well as where they fit in any design and development process
• Practice developing compelling scenarios driven by user data
• See how to extract useful requirements from scenarios
• Use scenarios to group functionality, draft initial screen layouts, and then assess and iterate solutions
• Learn how driving the storytelling can result in driving the process

Target audience

Designers, product managers, or anyone who wants better tools for generating data-driven design, developing a shared vision, and breaking down silos

Materials provided

Slides and handouts.