(Illustrated above) An architect finds that her studio’s new building modeling application requires a substantially different mindset. Instead of drawing individual elevations, plans, and details for a project, her team will collaboratively create a single, shared 3D model of their building design. The new tool itself communicates this overriding distinction in numerous ways, including how various functions are named.

A scientist quickly develops a working understanding of how her analysis application calculates and presents certain values. Overall, the way the tool displays her lab’s clinical data reminds her of a powerful, zooming microscope.

A financial trader receives periodic updates from the vendor that created his firm’s trading application. In one of these updates, he learns that he will need to develop a clear understanding of how, when, and why some new functionalities will usefully automate certain trade parameters.

What organizing, big picture mental models do targeted individuals currently have for the work practices that your team is striving to mediate?

How do the mindsets and constraints inherent in different tasks or larger activities drive workers to adopt different frameworks for thinking and acting?

How might your team use your insights into these mental models as a basis for envisioning innovative and compelling conceptual models for your computing tool?

What essential, high level operational approaches in your sketched application ideas could reference and extend upon workers’ existing ways of thinking about their efforts?

How might individual functionalities make similar connections to workers’ current understandings?

What new and different conceptual foundations might workers need to understand in order to successfully make use of your computing tool in their own practices? How could these new conceptual models be framed by their existing mental models?

How might people in different roles, using application displays that are tailored to their own identities, develop different conceptual models for your sketched computing tools? How could this impact their common ground for communication?

What might it sound like when a hypothetical user describes one of your proposed conceptual models? What takeaways should they have about your tool’s purpose, offerings, and behaviors?

How might your teams’ proposed conceptual models be communicated through application design and functional scaffolding? Through other channels, such as informative marketing and introductory instruction?

How could your approaches to communicating target conceptual models tie into your larger ideas about design strategy and brand?

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?