User scenario
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A user scenario is used to communicate an idea for a product or experience involving interactivity. The designer shows and/or tells an engaging short story, about a fictitious person using the interactive product or interacting with the "smart" architectural space, artwork, or virtual environment (from a web page to immersive virtual reality experience). User scenarios are an evolution of thought experiments, historically used to explain natural phenomena with simple logical stories, helping readers grasp complex ideas, non-technically, without equations. Albert Einstein's elevator and train, Sir Isaac Newton's apple, Maxwell's demon, and Schrödinger's cat are classic examples.
Vannevar Bush's As We May Think essay (published in the 1945 Atlantic Monthly) was the user scenario that resulted in the computer interface you may be using right now, as well as the idea of hyperlinks (like you probably just clicked to read this). It was Bush's scenario describing the fictitious Memex machine that inspired Douglas C. Engelbart to see the potential of a (as yet, nonexistent) personal computer. Bush's scenario allowed Engelbart to secure the funding necessary to design the computer mouse and first graphical user interface in 1968.
