(Illustrated above) A financial trader begins booking a deal in his trading application and is presented with a brief advisory created by analysts within his own firm. The advisory relates specifically to the item that he is about to trade, and based on its proprietary insights, he decides to cancel the deal.

An architect uses her building modeling application to label a certain area of a floor plan as kitchen space. In the tool’s notifications pane, a list of defined client requirements appears with the word kitchen highlighted in each item. The pane also presents product information for appliances that need to be incorporated into the kitchen space.

A scientist selects a specific gene variant within in a large clinical data set in her analysis application. The application then presents a small notification that provides links to recent research papers with findings related to the variant.

How do targeted individuals currently use supplemental or reference information in the work practices that your team is striving to mediate?

What specific sources do workers trust? Why?

Are valued sources created within targeted organizations, or do they come from openly available online references and outside, networked vendors?

What value do preferred sources provide in targeted individuals’ decision making processes? How are they relevant?

Which sources are considered underused and could often be influential if knowledge workers took time to explore them?

Which change frequently or are too extensive to keep mentally available?

How might your application concepts meaningfully “tap into” or connect with certain preferred sources? Could the development of reference content become a service oriented element of your team’s product?

When and where within your team’s functionality concepts could there be value in adaptively pushing suggested content from trusted sources into the periphery of users’ displays?

In which targeted operations and larger tasks could such functionality become a persistent, unwanted distraction?

What programmatic logic could effectively search for supplemental information that “fits” various situations?

How attention grabbing and directive should pushed information be, given the nature of the work practices that it is intended to support?

How might the relevancy of certain information sources change over time?

What customization options could allow targeted individuals and organizations to receive only their preferred content?

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?