(Illustrated above) A financial trader typically has several of his trading application’s tables open on his screens at the same time, displaying available assets, offers, booked deals, trade balances, and other meaningful categories of information. While making trading decisions, he often searches and manipulates these tabular views to locate and examine specific information.

An architect uses tables in her building modeling application as alternate or complementary views to the 3D building form in a project’s file. She finds that these tables are often useful when she is looking for named objects in a design that she cannot remember the location of spatially.

A scientist frequently uses tables in her analysis application in conjunction with graphical visualizations of clinical data. When she has spotted an interesting trend in an interactive graph, the complementary tables contain the detailed information that she needs in order to make sense of specific results from a variety of exacting perspectives.

How are tables currently used in the work practices that your team is striving to mediate? Might other types of information representation support these goals more effectively?

What expectations for table functionalities have targeted individuals developed from using other interactive applications? What standard or unusual table options do they value in their computing tools?

What opportunities for tabular representation are inherent in your team’s sketched functionality concepts? How might these tables be supplemented with alternate views of the same application content?

What design options might you envision with the goal of making your product’s tables more than just flat lists of data? How might the interactive and contextual appearance of certain visual cues call attention to important line items?

What functional options could be valuable for different categories of tables within your application concepts? How might certain options support workers’ information seeking, content organizing, and sense making goals?

Which grids in your team’s envisioned functional areas could become a frequent focus of workers’ attentions and activities? How might more extensive functionality, such as specialized searching, filtering, and sorting options, provide value in these central tables?

Which lists in your sketched application directions, by contrast, could benefit from the simplicity of very limited functionality?

Where might interaction requirements be extensive enough to suggest that workers’ practices could be better supported through clear and direct transfer of content to a supplementary, feature rich computing tool, such as a spreadsheet?

How might your team’s ideas about highly functional tables relate to your other design responses for supporting work in the context of volumes of information?

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?