ABSTRACT
Scenario-based design is a family of techniques in which the use of a future system is concretely described at an early point in the development process. 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. Beginning in the 1970s, scenario-based methods were widely adopted and developed in corporate strategic management. In scenario-based design, key situations of use in established work practice are enumerated and described in schematic narratives. The power of scenarios to convey concreteness through tentative and sketchy descriptions derives from the way people create and understand stories. Scenarios are multifarious design objects; they describe designs at multiple levels of detail and with respect to multiple perspectives. A stronger scenario-based software development method is use cases. A use case is a set of system event traces that accomplish a particular scenario goal within a given system model.
