A scenario is a plausible story about a persona using the future product or service to achieve a goal (or a complete a task, or fulfill an intention...) from start to finish, within a particular context.
A good scenario:
- Describes some of the interaction, with enough detail to make it compelling, but not so much detail as to be overwhelming.
- Provides a shared understanding for everyone on your team about what a user might want to do and how they might do it.
- Helps you construct the sequence of events that are necessary to address in your user interface.
- Can be sketchy, as long as it provokes ideas and discussion.
Keep in mind what a scenario IS:
- A means of wrapping our heads around what it is we are designing
- A means of seeing pieces of functionality as part of a flow, and not just within a silo
- A means of surfacing key questions about functional specifications
- A description of a realistic, typical set of circumstances under which a real Laddawn distributor or CE rep might use a particular set of features, and how those features might work in the context of other features
- A means to an end, rather than an end unto itself
As well as what it is NOT:
- An exhaustive review of all the possible ways in which the feature(s) might be used or misused, including "edge cases"
- A complete description of functional specifications that you vote yay or nay on