A scenario, in the context of information system design, is a concrete story about use. It is couched at the level at which people understand and experience their own behavior. A scenario describes an existing or envisioned system from the perspective of one or more users and includes a narration of their goals, plans, and reactions.
Scenario-based design elaborates a traditional theme in human factors and ergonomics, namely, the principle that human characteristics and needs should be pivotal considerations in the design of tools and artifacts. In scenario-based design, descriptions of usage situations become more than just orienting examples and background data, they become first-class design objects.
Scenario Example
The scenario narrative below answers the following four questions:
A user just took a lot of pictures (hundreds) on vacation with his digital camera. He wants to put them all on his website. The pictures are just too big, they don't fit on his web pages correctly and they take up too much file space on his website. He could do this manually in PhotoDraw by opening and resizing each picture. This will take him hours. He wishes there was a way to just tell Photodraw to just make them all the same size and have PhotoDraw do the hard work. So, while playing around with the File menu he sees and then launches Photodraw's Batch Save Wizard. He tells the wizard where the original pictures are and where to put the new ones and he chooses to make them all fit into 1024x768. When the wizard finishes, he opens his "My Documents" folder and he has all his photos resized. He can now copy them to his web site. We saved him many hours of really-boring work."