Purpose

Scenarios are descriptions of users' interaction with a system. By using scenarios, designers are better able to focus on users' needs rather than technical details or implementation constraints.

Process

Before we started creating our scenarios, we reviewed our persona's informational and emotional needs. We incorporated many details of the recipe search interaction from our directed storytellings, to ensure we were creating realistic and accurate use cases. After we felt comfortable with the goals of our personas, we wrote out the steps that would be necessary for them to complete their task. We then mapped these out to the wireframes we created earlier using the navigational map as a guide to the interaction.

Final Scenarios

Josh

For Josh, the pressure is mounting. On his first few dates, Janice suggested excellent restaurants and clubs to go to. Clearly, this is a girl with good taste. She's also a vegetarian. Valentines Day is just around the corner, and Josh has offered to cook a romantic dinner for Janice at his new condo.

He needs to pull together a menu to impress her. Josh is no slouch in the kitchen, but he needs a little inspiration, and a little help as he's never cooked an entirely vegetarian meal before. He turns to the hottest new Web 2.0 recipe site: CooksBook.

Josh opens his web browser to the main page of the website, which is also the default recipe search page. He knows his dish needs to be vegetarian, so he looks for a way to constrain the browsable recipes to those that are only vegetarian. He does this by clicking "vegetables" on the ingredient filter. Immediatly, the page updates to show him only vegetarian recipes. As he browses through them, he thinks, "will I like this, will Janice like this, and do I already know how to cook something that will go well with this". He finds a recipe that satisfies all these constraints and then clicks on it to bring up the recipe detail page. On this page, he checks the ingredients list to assess the difficulty of the recipe being attempted. None of the ingredients seem that intimidating and he confirms he can handle this recipe by looking through the procedure. He then commits to the recipe and prints it out of a 3x5 card. He carries this card with him to the grocery to collect any ingredients he doesn't already have and uses it in the kitchen as a guide while he is cooking. The meal turns out great, so he keeps the card in the recipe box.

Margo

Margo was looking for nigella seeds for a new recipe at her favorite farmers' market, and as she was walking by, one of the vendors she knows beckoned her over. Apparently one of his friends at the fish market had just received a fresh haul of Chilean sea bass that was unusually good. Margo's friends were due to stop by the next day for dinner, and she jumped at the chance to cook a fish she had only ever eaten in restaurants.

She has called her friends and told them to bring South American side dishes and appetizers. She's looking forward to some great ceviche! Now she only has to figure out how to cook the sea bass. Her family cookbooks won't be of any help, and she doesn't like calling her aunt without a recipe in mind. Enter CooksBook.

Margo is a heavy user and contributor to Cooksbook, so he logs into the site upon launching it. Since she was raised with cookbooks and appreciates their aesthetic and editorial content, she wants to search for a cookbook that contains a recipe for sea bass. She clicks on the top "Cookbook" navigation and is brought to the cookbook search page. Here, she constrains her search by selecting "Fish" on the ingredient filter. After looking through the resulting cookbook descriptions and not finding anything that arouses her interest, she further constrains the search by selecting "Sea Bass" as a subcategory of "Fish" in the ingredient filter. Here, she finds a cookbook by a woman who has written another recipe book that Margo likes a lot. She clicks on the book and reaches the cookbook detail page. This page has a lengthy description about the cookbook and the background of many of the recipes within it. She finds the recipe for sea bass and clicks on it, which takes her to the recipe detail page. Here, she checks out the ingredients and decides to call her expert-cook aunt, to see if the recipe is authentic. Her aunt suggests a substitution, which Margo makes by clicking on the inauthentic ingredient and selecting a substitution from the substitution list. With the recipe just the way she wants it, Margo prints the recipe on full-page, which she uses while cooking and writes notes on. After the dinner, which was a big success, Margo adds notes about the substitution to the recipe page on Cooksbook for other community members to use.