Kris Krois's List: UX: User Scenarios...

• Description of fictional yet realistic persons that represents a target user group/market.
• Personas
• A story describing a user’s problem situation and how she might use a product to achieve a solution.
• Scenarios

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• Designing with users in mind is a tricky thing. Not only does it require of us a sound understanding of who our users are, but the actual act of translating what we know about them into a well-designed product is not always an obvious or easy path.

• What is a user scenario?
• Why do I need user scenarios?
• When do I need user scenarios?
• What does a good user scenario look like?
• Who is the user I’m designing for?
• What does this user want on my site?
• How is this user going to achieve his goals?
• Why does this user come to my site?
• User scenarios are short stories that tell us about our users motivation, their goals and actions on our website. When writing a user scenario, keep it short and to the point. The four w-questions who? what? how? why? can be used as checklist for the most relevant information to include in a user scenario. Good user scenarios help to define concrete design requirements and improve our usability and achieve high user experience.

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• To discover your primary persona(s):

   
   
  • Go through each one and ask "Do I have to enable this person to succeed? If this person can’t always use my site successfully, is it a failure?"
   
  • If the answer is "Yes", hang on to the persona for now. If not, discard them.
   
  • Then start comparing your personas in pairs. Consider their typical contexts of use, and imagine that there is a solution that works for each persona in their own context. You don’t have to visualise how the solution works just yet.
   
  • Ask, "Will a solution designed for the Persona A also let Persona B achieve her goals?" And vice versa. "Will a solution designed just for B also work for A?"
   
  • If you find one persona’s solution that doesn’t work for a different persona, but they will work the other way round, you can discard the persona with the less widely-useful solution. They are clearly not a primary persona.
   
  • If you find that neither solution is applicable to the other, keep both personas, because they might both be primary.
   
  • Keep comparing different pairs until you can truthfully say, "My solution must work for all these, but none of them can succeed with an interface designed for anyone else."

• Devise a few realistic, typical scenarios for each persona, following the steps below, and record notes on each one:

   
   
  • Consider carefully the typical environment your persona is in. Where are they when they’re interacting with your web site. Are they at work? At home? In an airport?
   
  • What other factors impact the persona’s context of use? What speed of internet connection do they have? How much time do they have? What distractions are there?
   
  • What specific goal is driving the persona to interact with the web site on this occasion? What event triggered this scenario?
   
  • Picture the scene. What considerations will be foremost in the persona’s mind? What clues are they looking for in particular?