User scenarios

Why user scenarios? Scenarios help the whole project team focus on how a project will be used in the real world by real people in various contexts, who are not mere actors upon a system but bring rather a host of emotions, attitudes and aspirations along with them to your product and your website. Great user experiences are created when a company learns to have empathy for their customers, understanding them not merely as members of market segments, but real complex humans making their way in a complex world.

There are many ways to get to these; observing your users in their native habitats (contextual inquiry) to learn about the contexts in which they use your product has become more and more of a staple of design research. However, even when access to customers is limited, you can still use traditional market research supplemented with interviews to devise credible user scenarios that are useful in your design work.

UK Retail customer scenarios

Under my direction, my UK team crafted and validated these user scenarios from marketing data, participating in focus groups, interviewing customer service reps and listening in on their conversations with customers, reviewing results from prior usability tests, and by interviewing our friends, family and neighbors, focusing on their attitudes towards and experience with financial services in the UK: