which scenarios are examples of physical changes

#Which scenarios are examples of physical changes software#

In a hospitality setting, cleaning and maintenance roles would not have access to accounting information (and vice versa). The relationships between roles are not always hierarchical, though. Similarly, in many contexts some roles are associated with greater responsibility and therefore more functionality is available to them. The travel example above is a case in point: for some transactions it is important to know whether the user is the customer, the passenger or both. So, the focus in user-centered scenarios is personas, with the concept of role being used only when relevant. These roles tell us almost nothing about how we need to design our solutions.

In more general solutions the role may simply be expressed as “user”. In the travel industry the role is “passenger” or “customer” depending on the transaction. For example, in an e-commerce solution the role is “customer”. While personas can take one or more roles in the context of a system, user research provides us with a wealth of information about a persona’s relationship to a role: Do they love it or hate it? Is the role well-defined or vague? What are the pain points? (And so on.) Also, particularly in customer-facing systems, the roles themselves are not very meaningful. This approach is counter-productive from a user-centered design perspective since there is no detailed understanding of the roles themselves or how the activities being described in the (prescriptive) scenarios are actually performed.

#Which scenarios are examples of physical changes software#

In software development, scenarios are typically focused on actors who assume one or more roles within the system. Scenarios, Personas and RolesĪlthough usually textual, user scenarios paint a “rich picture” of important factors behind users’ needs and behaviors. In so doing they’re intended to promote empathy and understanding, as well as a user focus in a technological solution, whether it’s a website, wearable device or voice assistant. Their purpose is to provide motivation and back stories explaining how and why they need to interact with our solutions the way they do. © Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0 Individual scenarios are usually describing a particular path through an interactive system. Prescriptive scenarios are perhaps one of the main reasons that software systems are not inherently easy to use since both the use cases and prescriptive scenarios describe what users should do, as if they were a programmed system component. A well-known instance is the “sunny day scenario” when everything happens as it should.

The term “scenario” is used in this context to describe just one path – one set of outcomes – through the use case. (They have been supplanted by user stories in many methods.) Use cases are intended to describe all of the possible outcomes from a particular set of events. Use cases are intended to describe how a system responds to events and became the core for many software development methods from the mid-1980s onwards. A typical example would be a scenario derived from a use case. Prescriptive scenarios describe what should happen but don’t necessarily reflect any consideration for user needs and behaviors. In wider-ranging discussions within software development, they can range from “prescriptive” to “evocative” (see “The Persona Lifecycle” under Learn More About User Scenarios). The term and general concept of scenarios has many uses.