(Illustrated above) A financial trader works through the process of booking trades over and over again in his trading application, expertly reading an offer, analyzing its context and value, making his decision, and accomplishing his chosen action. Each time he has finished this “story,” he can confidently move on.

An architect learns to plan for certain steps when managing the potential chaos of proposed changes in her building modeling application. Proposed alterations to a building design are submitted by different consultants via the same shared tool, then collaboratively resolved, before being signed off by controlling members of the overall team.

A scientist learns her analysis application’s export process so well that she eventually structures some of her analysis approaches based on the stepwise, useful stepwise flow of exporting results from a study’s database.

How important are targeted individuals’ current “cognitive scripts” in the tasks and larger activities that your team is striving to mediate?

How established and consistent are certain narratives? Do workers share very similar procedural stories in their professional cultures, or are these structures more varied within and across targeted organizations?

How have particular stories about work approaches been learned and taught within communities of practice?

How do existing narratives start, progress, climax, and conclude? Which exceptions and irregularities do they reference?

How do individuals’ internal scripts encapsulate “normal,” archetypal situations? How common is such normalcy in observed practice?

What useful simplifications do workers’ current stories provide? How do these simplifications steer and scope effort in valuable ways?

What do existing stories leave out? What might these omissions tell your team about related automaticity, expectations of effort, tacit knowledge, perceptions of value, and other important considerations for mediating work with technology?

What pathways of interaction and progressive disclosure in your team’s application concepts could meaningfully reflect and dovetail with workers’ existing narratives?

What novel functionality concepts could benefit from a grounding focus in narrative structure? How might the structure of new stories help users to build appropriate conceptual models of your team’s computing tool?

Which of your product’s envisioned functional areas does not necessarily lend itself to preordained, ”baked in” narrative structures, beyond smaller interactive expectations that are tied to certain operations?

How might your team’s various narrative ideas be incorporated into your sketched directions for instructional content and other scaffolding for effective adoption?

What impact might your choices about narrative structures in your application concepts have on your product's larger 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?