How do you generate and select scenarios for different stages of design research?

Defining the scope and objectives in design research is almost the same as setting a roadmap. It involves clarifying the destination, understanding the terrain, and identifying milestones. The scope acts as a compass, guiding through possibilities, discerning vital aspects, and ensuring scenarios align with goals. Questions about users, stakeholders, needs, and defining success are pivotal. This forms the foundation of purposeful design, ensuring each stride is deliberate and meaningful. It's crucial to involve all stakeholders and communicate that the design research scope and objectives differ from the project/product, changing based on the roadmap progress.

Completely agree! In creative study, it's essential to establish precise goals and objectives. It guarantees that the results are in line with the overarching goal for the good or service in addition to offering a roadmap for the research process. Early target user and stakeholder identification aids in customizing the research to their unique requirements and expectations. Furthermore, establishing quantifiable objectives for success makes it possible to assess the research findings more successfully.

A clear and focused approach to your design research is non-negotiable. By identifying your main questions, target users, and key features upfront, you ensure a productive journey. How will you measure success in your design research?

An essential first step in developing a user-centered product or service is creating user profiles. Knowing the situations in which people interact with the product offers an essential component of knowledge; it's not just about the demographics. By carrying out extensive user research, it is ensured that the personalities are authentic and reflect actual user experiences rather than merely being made-up characters. It all comes down to empathy and matching the objectives and pain areas of the user to your design. The likelihood of developing a product that satisfies the needs of your target market is considerably increased by using this strategy.

Creating a key persona that may be real user or a fictious character is very important to bridge the gap between ideal conditions and real world usage. Any R&D will need multiple scenario testing and key persona will ensure not only what the product usage by actual real world users would be, but also how it should be used ideally.

Understanding your users deeply can be a game-changer. Empathy-driven design, grounded in real data, helps you meet users where they are. How are you currently gathering insights about your users' contexts?

Making relevant and user-centric designs requires developing user personas and understanding the context. To give such characters life and explore different options, scenarios are essential. Role-playing, improvisation, and storyboarding are effective techniques for fostering creativity and imagining various user interactions. Analogies can also provide a novel viewpoint and spark creative problem-solving. It all comes down to creating an environment that is creative and supportive of thinking outside the box and pushing the boundaries of design.

The scenarios can be related to the main mental models identified and the developments to the main moments of the journey. Whether they are good or bad.

Embrace creative ideation to uncover fresh design ideas, even if they seem unfeasible at first. How often are you integrating techniques like storyboarding or role-playing into your design process?

before we dive into prototyping: always know your questions. It's like planning a trip—you need a destination. What do you want to find out? Those questions are your compass in the prototyping journey. If you're unsure where you're going, start with a reeeeally basic prototype. It's like sketching a map to test ideas and answer those initial direction questions. As things get clearer, move to mid-level refinement. Now it's about how elements fit or if your design matches overall goals. When you're almost ready to roll, the high-fidelity UI prototype is your final check. Answer specific questions about features and flows, aligning everything with your grand plan. From scratch to a Figma prototype there is a looong road

Every design process must be successful, and this includes choosing the appropriate situations for testing and development. Your focus on factors like feasibility, innovation, diversity, and relevance offers a thorough framework for making defensible choices. Ensuring that the scenarios are in line with the project's goals and scope while prioritizing user demands is important.

Selecting the right scenarios for prototyping is crucial to refining your design. Balancing relevance, diversity, novelty, and feasibility ensures you address real user needs while pushing innovation. How do you prioritize and choose which scenarios to prototype and test?

Developing attractive scenarios is indeed essential for effectively communicating and documenting the results of design research. Your scenarios will have a greater impact if you include narration, visuals, supporting details, and an appeal to action. It's amazing how scenarios may be a useful tool for exploring design solutions as well as for assisting in user understanding.

The scenario refinement must rely on the main details analyzed in previous research. The interesting thing is that we can combine elements from different sources to make the scenario more assertive. e.g.: designing a problem considering data from user interviews, desk research and behavioral/usage metrics.

Refining and communicating your scenarios effectively turns design insights into compelling stories that resonate. How are you currently using narration and visualization to convey your design research findings and engage stakeholders?

Have you ever thought about the perpetuity of a business? I once used scenarios to help with the process. To do this, we raise all the problems or signs that could "end" our client's business in the next 10 years. This resulted in a large wall full of post it notes. After that, we grouped them by affinity and prioritized those that were most impactful. Then, scenarios were created to assist in the exercise of developing future scenarios for the business.