(Illustrated above) An architect sometimes gets confused while rapidly navigating the virtual space of her building modeling application. She often turns on the application’s scale indictor and a small overview map of the building model, both of which help her to orient herself without devoting much of her conscious attention to wayfinding.

A financial trader learning a new trading application leaves a reference dialog open on one of his monitors so that he can quickly refer to its legend whenever he is unsure of a symbol’s meaning.

A scientist needs the visualizations in her analysis application to always be framed by graphic scales. Without them, she finds it easy to jump to incorrect conclusions while quickly switching through different views of her lab’s clinical data.

What supporting content do targeted individuals currently reference while using information representations in the operations and larger tasks that your team is striving to mediate?

How might existing interpretive cues and explanatory information, or their underlying intents, be incorporated into your team’s functionality concepts?

What advanced analogies to other types of information display might you draw upon when envisioning useful representational codes and contexts for your sketched application directions?

What additional supporting conventions could provide value in the varied representations that your team has envisioned? Could specific data displays valuably include further labels, keys, or scope indication?

How might support for certain representations relate to, or literally connect with, appropriate instructional content in your computing tool’s help functionalities?

How could key instances of representational support be made parallel with your product’s error prevention and handling conventions?

Where could persistent presentation of representational codes and context provide value in workers’ practices?

When might targeted workers come to view supporting content as clutter after they have learned how to interpret a visual display? How might certain codes and context cues be interactively hidden or displayed in support of these scenarios?

What customizations might your team provide to allow targeted individuals and organizations to tailor representational aids to their own local needs?

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?