User Scenario history and definition                                    < identical page to bookmark >

user scenario  n.
in art and design, 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. Einstein's elevator and train, Newton's apple, Maxwell's demon, and Schrödinger's cat are classic examples.
source © 2003 Interactivity Consultants

A working prototype of an idea is extremely helpful, but a single well-communicated user scenario was enough to inspire what became the World Wide Web and today's "windows desktop" and "mouse."

The work of Tod Seisser in the advertising realm gives some examples of how to demonstrate ideas in video. To see other examples Tod uses, probably for a educational demonostration look at these sites:

Web Trends and Media Work
The Tod Seisser Literature Game
The BlueFinn blog
A longer Literature Game Example featuring Seisser

Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" article (published in the 1945 Atlantic monthly) was the user scenario that resulted in the computer interface you're using right now, as well as the idea of links (like you 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 mouse and windows interface in 1968.

In Bush's groundbreaking user scenario, the Memex user sat in a chair behind a screen, where all recorded human knowledge was instantly available to be projected from microfilms stored in the machine. The fictitious user could create or follow "information trails" (that even a child would now call "links" or "hyperlinks") to navigate through the sum total of all human learning, art, and philosophy. Ted Nelson, who coined the term "hypertext" in 1965 (making "hyperlinks an actual reality) directly credits Vannevar Bush's user scenario for giving him the idea.