I was attending a CHI-ICSID joint workshop on ‘Human factors through Human Experiences’ in CHI 2004, Vienna. The workshop was moderated by Joy Mountford of Macintosh fame and Leo Frisberg. We had a thoroughly enriching experience attending that workshop as we pondered upon many interesting confluences of user centered design methods and requirements gathering of Human Factors Engineering. Joy happened to make a very interesting comment: How effectively can you prototype - ‘embody’ or ’situate’ an experience. Truly some experiences are extremely difficult to model through interaction diagrams, task flow or conceptual mock ups! The traditional use of scenario has been to capture and explicate the details of a usage instance, but it does little to ‘embody’ an experience. John M. Carroll, in his “Five Reasons for Scenario-Based Design,”quoted:

Scenarios of human-computer interaction help us to understand and to create computer systems and applications as artifacts of human activities as things to learn from, as tools to use in one’s work, as media for interacting with other people. Scenario-based design of information technology addresses five technical challenges: Scenarios evoke reflection in the content of design work, helping developers coordinate design action and reflection. Scenarios are at once concrete and flexible, helping developers manage the fluidity of design situations. Scenarios afford multiple views of an interaction, diverse kinds and amounts of detailing, helping developers manage the many consequences entailed by any given design move. Scenarios can also be abstracted and categorized, helping designers to recognize, capture, and reuse generalizations, and to address the challenge that technical knowledge often lags the needs of technical design. Finally, scenarios promote work-oriented communication among stakeholders, helping to make design activities more accessible to the great variety of expertise that can contribute to design, and addressing the challenge that external constraints designers and clients often distract attention from the needs and concerns of the people who will use the technology.

Here are some interesting examples of creating rich experiential prototypes:

Experiential Storyboarding

Experiences and workflows narrated through a rich medium, spanned out over abstract representation of time. Here is an example of Comic Strip style story boarding. You can find a really interesting discussion by Rebekah Sedaca here: ‘Comics: Not just for laughs’ . Very intriguing indeed, but I personally think the medium of comic strips has not been exploited fully so far. Two essential qualities that a technical design story board should have are non-linearity and simultaneity. Comic medium can provide both!

On a more system engineering perspective, USBD process accommodates interaction sequences or diagrams, use case storyboards, UML artifacts, the User Interface Screens to create a time and path exploded experiential sequence.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/05/1129_donatelli/