Visualize and predict . At the third step, the designer's attention finally turns to the object or system being designed. Techniques for brainstorming, sketching, prototyping, simulating, and analyzing designs are intermixed as appropriate for the project. Even in this step, though, attention remains on the user. A central way of fleshing out the details of a design is to develop detailed storyboards or scenarios of a person using the new device.
Scenarios are fictional stories, with characters, events, products, and environments.
They project product ideas and themes into the context of a realistic future. Storyboards are highly visual, using photographs or comic-book sequences of drawings to depict the interactions between people and artifacts. In both cases, the concreteness helps to reveal aspects of the design that otherwise might not occur to the designer. A storyboard depicts a sequence of activities in which the object being designed plays a role. By providing a concrete representation for the user, setting, and action sequence, it brings out aspects of the design that are invisible when more abstract specification methods are used.