(Illustrated above) An architect expects the act of grouping elements together within her building modeling application to be rapid and direct. She is surprised when she is prompted to specify seemingly unimportant information about a grouping before she can proceed with unifying it.

A financial trader “test driving” a new trading application expects the optimal pathways for certain common tasks to be as fast as they are in the tool that he currently uses. His opinions about novel functionality are more open.

A scientist, while specifying the attributes of several clinical samples in her lab’s information management application, is surprised by how quickly she is able to enter required and desired information for each sample.

How much effort do targeted workers currently spend on the specific operations, tasks, and larger activities that your team is striving to mediate? What benchmarks do they use?

What do targeted individuals and organizations think of these current levels of effort?

Do people find any of their current work practices to be repetitive or tedious?

What practices do knowledge workers not want to change, despite high effort requirements? Why?

What general expectations do workers have about the impact of computing tools on the effort needed to accomplish their workplace goals?

How do expectations of effort vary across targeted individuals, roles, organizations, and other factors?

Which of your functionality concepts will likely be recognized as significantly reducing effort in certain activity contexts? Is this a compelling value proposition?

Where might workers accept additional effort in a new computing tool if it was seen as providing additional value? How could that value tradeoff be embodied and communicated in your sketched functional offerings?

What design approaches might make work feel like it is taking less effort than it actually is? What advanced analogies to other products and domains could inform your team’s ideas about reducing perceived effort?

How might your scenarios for desirable reductions in effort factor into the story of your product’s 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?