1.3 Defining Scenarios and Outcomes

The Principles of Design Thinking guide your day-to-day work.

They ensure you’re keeping the users you have defined in the first phase ('Empathising') in mind, collaborating with a diverse team, and continuously trying to implement your solutions.

Before moving to the definition of the current scenario, it is essential to introduce the Keys of Design Thinking.

They ensure you’re keeping the users you have defined in the first phase ('Empathising') in mind, collaborating with a diverse team, and continuously trying to implement your solutions.

Before moving to the definition of the current scenario, it is essential to introduce the Keys of Design Thinking.

The Principles of Design Thinking guide your day-to-day work. They ensure you’re keeping the users you have defined in the first phase ('Empathising') in mind, collaborating with a diverse team, and continuously trying to implement your solutions.

Before moving to the definition of the current scenario, it is essential to introduce the Keys of Design Thinking.

The Keys help keep teams focused and aligned on outcomes that matter to users. When working on a new initiative, you need to keep them in mind to align decisions and progress within your team.

Hills: align your team around the meaningful user outcomes you want to achieve. Hills are statements of intent written as user enablements. They follow a format of Who, What, and Wow.

  • Who: Who is your user? Refer to them by name.
  • What: What will your user be able to do that they couldn’t before? Start with a verb and avoid solutions!
  • Wow: What will your users be able to achieve?

Playbacks: stay aligned by regularly exchanging feedback. Playbacks are story-based presentations that share insights, ideas, and updates to user experience.

Sponsor Users: invite users into the work and stay true to real-world needs. Sponsor Users are external clients, future clients, or end users that represent your target user, who regularly contribute domain expertise to your team. Relationships with Sponsor Users are typically formalised with an agreement that covers confidentiality and our right to use their feedback.

Defining scenarios

Let's use this stage to define what the current scenario is like and, working on potential future ones, let's think about how to implement the situation of the users you have defined in the previous 'Empathising' phase.

Add the users in the boxes at the top of the template, and define at least one possible scenario for each of them.

After this, select the most likely user scenarios and start to define the future 'big scenario' of the destination, taking into account how it will effect the users you have identified in the first stage.

Finally, work on hills, in other words, state an intent, or action that will turn out to have a positive impact on the users, as a first step towards an overall positive future scenario and a solution to your challenge.

Template material

They ensure you’re keeping the users you have defined in the first phase ('Empathising') in mind, collaborating with a diverse team, and continuously trying to implement your solutions.

Before moving to the definition of the current scenario, it is essential to introduce the Keys of Design Thinking.