(Illustrated above) A financial trader appreciates how his trading application gives him the shortest set of available action options when he looks at a trading message. He feels that these targeted options, which are based on each message’s current state, allow him to work faster, without second guessing what else he could be doing.

A scientist likes that the interface of her new analysis application provides a range of choices for exploring data at various levels of aggregation, including actions that used to be “missing” or “hidden” when she made certain selections within other visualization tools.

An architect becomes accustomed to the actions that are available to her in a new building modeling application. Even though it is an open workspace tool, with many options available for her to select at any given time, it feels like the functions that she ends up seeing first often correspond to what she is presently currently trying to accomplish.

How are certain artifacts currently used in different activity contexts? Are these usages consistent across targeted organizations?

How might your team map your emerging ideas about mediating knowledge work as the actions that can be performed on different types of interaction objects?

What potential actions could be most important for key object types? The least important?

Where could the nature of a particular action vary based on the type of interaction object that it is performed on? How might your sketched functionality concepts reflect these differences?

Which objects typically serve as tools for acting on other objects, rather than being the recipients of actions themselves?

How could the states of interaction objects, or larger application states, influence the actions that are available at a given time?

How might the sum of your team’s object and action mappings inform your ideation about application frameworks and interaction pathways?

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?