Challenges faced when teaching how to write a user scenario

The importance of the scenarios in the user-centered design process of low complexity interactive systems is well documented in various academic and professional articles. The aim of this study is to reveal the undocumented properties that distinguish useful (rich) scenarios from uninteresting (poor) ones. Two student projects, involving scenario writing, were used to detect the aspects that define the quality of a user scenario. A total of 298 scenarios were individually and blindly graded by three experts in user-centered design and then analyzed following a grounded approach. A number of aspects that distinguish the "rich" from the "poor" scenarios were identified.