(Illustrated above) A scientist had previously analyzed her lab’s clinical data by using small portions of several different applications. Her new analysis application contains all of those useful functionalities in a single product, while “cutting the fat” of options that researchers like her never use.

A financial trader wants developers of a new trading application to focus on the core tasks that he repeats throughout his work day. While there are a lot of other features he would “like” to have, he does not want any of them added to the new tool if their inclusion would take away from exciting and appropriate support for the core of his trading work.

An architect uses different functionality in her building modeling application at different intervals of a building project’s life span. While she feels that she has used a majority of the tool’s available options at one point or another, during any one interval of a project she uses only a concentrated subset of its features.

Which specific operations, tasks, and larger activities will your team target with your computing tool?

Which elements in your mapped understandings of work practice will you intentionally exclude from your application concepts?

Which of your sketched functionality concepts emerge as the essential, valuable, and desirable “core” that could support these targeted practices? What design strategies could that aggregation imply?

Which of your team’s functionality concepts could be prioritized as secondary? As tertiary? As potentially unnecessary?

Which of your envisioned directions for your computing tool map to one or more established product genres in your targeted markets?

If your envisioned product is not representative of a known genre, will workers perceive its key offerings as interrelated and cohesive given the context of their own practices?

What analogies might your team draw from established product genres in other, seemingly unrelated markets?

What are the overarching stories of your team’s emerging application concepts? What could these narratives mean for your product’s evolving brand and positioning in the market?

What functionalities do competing products provide that workers may expect from your team’s interactive application?

What larger product marketing, technology, and design trends could influence your team’s ideas about application scope?

Where could reductions in functional scope drive desirable simplicity in your application concepts?

How might ideas about product scope inform your team’s envisioning of an appropriate application framework, learnability requirements, and other key design considerations?

Do you have enough information to usefully answer these and other envisioning questions? What additional research, problem space models, and design concepting could valuably inform your team’s application envisioning efforts?