(Illustrated above) A scientist notices that her lab’s information management application has flagged a sample as having different attributes than other the samples that are associated with the same clinical research participant. She reviews the flagged sample’s details and discovers that a technician has made a data entry error that she needs to investigate before proceeding.

A financial trader reviews a list of incoming deal proposals. He looks for items that his trading application has automatically flagged as being immediately executable, indicating that his firm has sufficient quantity of the holding in question to meet a proposed deal’s stated needs.

An architect switches to a view in her building modeling application that flags elements of the project’s 3D model where her team has not applied any project requirements tags.

What characteristics and signs about artifacts do targeted individuals currently gravitate to in the tasks and larger activities that your team is striving to mediate?

Why are these characteristics and signs useful in certain work practices? What decisions and actions do they inform?

How might these existing attributes be translated into valuable flags for your team’s envisioned interaction objects?

What meaningful new flags might you envision to call out key object information within the interactive flows of your team’s sketched functionality concepts?

How could informative flags prevent human error in certain activity contexts? What specific information about an interaction object, if left unknown, might lead users to act in error?

What might the aesthetic presentation of “flags” look like in certain functionality concepts? How might these cues relate to any error management conventions your team has defined?

How could certain flags convey their priority, simply based on their level of salience on the screen?

How might your team’s ideas for specific flags inspire you to ideate valuable new interactions and representational forms?

What flagging categories and conventions might your team establish and consistently apply throughout your computing tool?

Could simplifying certain interaction objects make more sense than flagging important pieces of information within them?

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?