User Scenario is a visual scheme of user actions on the website to solve the problem, with which he came. User Scenario shows what hinders and what helps the user on your site, justifies how and why he/she is here, and explains how he/she realizes his/her plans.
And it’s one of the important preliminary stages of the work of creating the site.
User Scenarios are implemented in the format of short stories about the actions of the user, partly on behalf of the user, and partly abstracted from the person, schematically. These are stories about customers, about their motivation, about tasks and about options for interacting with your resource.
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Why Websites Need User Scenarios
User scenarios help you learn more about your customers who are visiting your site and analyze their user experience. They work for any online business, including a gambling website and a DIY marketplace. This is necessary not by itself but for designing the interface of the site so that the interaction with it for users was predictable, understandable, comfortable and requiring minimal effort. Designing user scenarios helps:
- Conduct usability tests of the site.
- Study user preferences.
- Predict a positive user experience.
- Find and accentuate points that are important in UX design.
- Understand at what stages of interaction the user needs help and cues, and possibly refinements to the site.
When the user scenarios for the site are not spelled out, serious problems are not excluded. For example, developers can misrepresent the interaction of the user with the site, not make clickable elements on which he will want to click, not provide functionality that could be useful to increase site conversion and sales growth.
These are errors that are much cheaper to prevent than to eliminate after the completion of a web resource.
Classification of Custom Scripts for the Site
User Stories
This is a story base, a brief summary of a portrait of the user and their needs as applied to a specific product. User Stories can be dozens or hundreds, depending on the number of products and target audience groups. For each narrow group, the user story will be different, and they will all be different. User Stories are written in the first person.
Concrete Scenarios
At this stage of working with custom scenarios, the ways to achieve the goals are outlined with technical details. Here are also written restrictions, if there are any. For example, specific scenarios will describe the actions of a person who places an order in the online store’s website, mobile version or app. Specific scenarios are no longer written in the first person, but in the third person.
Conceptual Scenarios
When user stories are written, they are grouped into conceptual behavioral scenarios. By combining several stories of the same type, all unnecessary and detailed things are removed from them, simplifying them almost to the maximum. In this case, the focus is no longer on the actions of a specific user, but on the conditional user, but not the technical details of his actions on the site. The description is in the third person.
Use Cases
Use Cases are step-by-step descriptions of technical interactions between the user and the system. It looks like a sequence of actions that the user performs to achieve a specific result. This is no longer a lyric or a description of the customer portrait, but actually a complete set of functional requirements for the site.
How to Design Effective User Scenarios
Not all custom scripts for websites are equally useful. To make sure that work on scripts is done right, consider several factors. Here they are:
- Draw portraits of users so that the abstract “target audience” turns into images of specific people. This is important to understand what kind of people will come to your site and what they can expect. For this it isn’t enough to specify only the gender and age of users. It’s important to understand their field of activity, social status, lifestyle – because the mother of two children can be a housewife, an entrepreneur, or an employee of a large company. And these are different requests, different interests, and different behavioral reactions.
- Answer the question “why do customers come to my online store right now?” Perhaps some were brought in by a positive user experience in the past, some came from contextual advertising, and still others were advised by their colleagues to go to a particular online store. The motivation and degree of loyalty of these users will be different, and this requires different user scenarios.
- Think about the goals with which the user comes to the site. He may come to find the right product and place an order, or he may come to compare prices in different online stores, and this too will be different user scenarios.
- Describe how users reach their goals. Do they set filters, study product specifications, price dynamics, and then make a buying decision? Do they open several sites at once and look at the price of the same product? Or perhaps they came to return the product at all and are looking for a way to do it? When designing user scenarios, capture all the key points of user interaction with the resource from start to finish.
Having prepared a stack of user scenarios, you can move on to developing the site’s architecture and usability.
Summary
A user scenario is a schematic description of the path of a person solving a particular task while on a particular site.
Designing user scenarios solves a large pool of problems, and strategically allows you to design the architecture of the resource so that the user can easily navigate and find information, and act comfortably.
All user scenarios are divided into 4 groups, each of which is associated with the next, and only together they become a cool assistant for specialists in website development.
For scenarios to be effective, understand your client and the goals they have when they look at your online store.
There is no single template for designing custom scripts in nature – it’s always a work in a specific set of conditions. And the better this work is done, the more user-friendly your site will eventually be.