(Illustrated above) A scientist is waiting for her analysis application to process a large set of clinical data so that she can visualize it. She can’t remember whether she has added all of the needed data to the study file being processed, so she pauses the analysis and brings up a planning spreadsheet as a cross reference to see if all of the same sample names are present.

An architect is collaborating with a colleague to complete a small documentation detail in their shared building modeling application. While her colleague makes changes in real time during their discussion, the architect can occasionally shift her attention to other areas of the same building model where she needs to devote her efforts for other, separate reasons.

A financial trader wants to open multiple feeds within his market information application to ensure that he is making a broadly informed decision while investigating the value of a particularly important deal.

What impromptu tangents and juxtapositions do targeted individuals currently make while accomplishing the work practices that your team is striving to mediate?

What value do these goal oriented excursions provide in the contexts of their tasks and larger activities?

What coordinated artifacts do targeted workers compare or act on in simultaneous, overlapping threads of effort?

What supplemental information sources do they frequently turn to during these circuitous paths? How might these sources be incorporated into your team’s application concepts?

What expectations do targeted workers have about the flexibility of their computing tools? Are these expectations driven from peoples’ related computing experiences, or their intrinsic understandings of their own ways of working?

What flexibilities in your functionality concepts could valuably support parallel threads of work, multiple threads of the same work, or other open variations in workers’ practices?

How might the interactive flows of your team’s sketched functionalities be effectively paused, stopped, and resumed?

Which of your envisioned functionality concepts do not require, or should not support, these kinds of dynamic flexibilities? What could this design stance mean for users’ experiences? Should your team reconsider these limitations?

How might the interaction models of your application concepts allow targeted workers to pull up and arrange different types of information based on their moment by moment needs?

How might these flexibilities detract from the usability of your sketched product proposals? At what point could clear and functional simplicity suffer in the name of rare, impromptu edge cases?

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?