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Low user adoption of company portals -- a common complaint these days as many companies upgrade their extranets and intranets -- is often a result of focusing on technical requirements rather than the real-life context of the system. User scenarios can help bridge the gap.

Inadequate user adoption of new technology has surfaced as a major reason why implementations fail to achieve expected results. A June 20, 2005, article in ComputerWorld reported that, "Badly designed software is costing businesses millions of dollars annually because it's difficult to use, requires extensive training and support, and is so frustrating that many end users under-utilize applications."

After conducting field research in a number of America's largest corporations, I am convinced that the root cause for disappointing rates of user adoption is that portals and other high-traffic systems are not designed according to the way that people think and work. Instead, the design process focuses on the table of requirements that is the basis for selecting the hardware and software components.

One method for shifting the focus from requirements to real-life system context is to incorporate user scenarios into the design process. User scenarios are realistic stories that describe how a person who is representative of an important user segment would go about using the system to accomplish specific goals.

User scenarios should not be confused with use cases. User scenarios describe how someone who is representative of a large or important segment of the user population will accomplish high-frequency or high-value tasks, using features of a system that will become available at a future time. Use cases are scripts for testing every facet of a system's functionality after it has been developed.

This article describes how to create user scenarios that can be used to guide the UI design of a portal or other complex system with many optional paths.

Identify meaningful user segments

To begin, the design team needs to divide the overall user population into distinct user segments. User segments are groups of people who have attributes in common that are likely to cause them to interact with an information system in more or less similar ways. For example, in terms of a portal, user segmentation could be based on job role and work context, such as "administrative assistants who work in offices other than corporate headquarters." Segments can be prioritized according to the size of the population they represent, or the influence they are likely to have on the portal's ultimate success. For example, store managers for a top retailer are not necessarily the largest group of employees, but they will have a conclusive impact on the adoption of the portal as a working tool. Therefore, they should be mapped in as a high-priority segment.

Create user profiles

For each user segment that has been identified, create a profile that describes the attributes that distinguish the segment from other segments. Profiles may include such attributes as: access to a computer, authorization to view executive-level reporting, Internet experience, mobility, etc. Semantic-differential scales, developed long ago for marketing research purposes, can be used to assess and represent attributes consistently across all the profiles.

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