Chapter 11. Designing for People

In previous chapters, I described personas and emphasized the importance of goals over tasks. Only after we know our user personas and their goals can we begin to examine tasks with confidence that they won't distort the design process. We call our tool for incorporating tasks scenarios. A scenario is a concise description of a persona using a software-based product to achieve a goal. In this chapter, I'll describe scenarios in more detail, along with a few other useful design tools. I'll follow with a case study of how some of these tools, particularly scenarios, work in the real world.

Scenarios

As the design work becomes more detailed, scenarios become more and more effective. We play our personas through these ...

Get Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.