(Illustrated above) A financial trader selects a deal in his trading application that he just made in error, then chooses an option to send a cancellation notice to his counterparty. The application generates a standard message with all of the necessary information to cancel the trade, and he adds a personal note to apologize for his miscalculation before sending it off.

An architect wants a drawing of a building’s proposed north elevation to show her client. She instructs her building modeling application to automatically export a conventional elevation drawing based on a template that her studio has designed for this type of output.

A scientist exports a canned report from her laboratory information management application. The compact, shareable document contains a set of standard data representations for a single clinical sample.

How standard, in reality, are the conventional communications that are currently used within targeted organizations? Which are not very standard at all — from the rationalizing perspective of a product team defining a new computing tool?

How do targeted individuals use highly defined types of communication in their own operations, tasks, and larger activities?

What goals can trigger workers to create these communication forms? Who are they sent to? How frequent are different cases?

Do workers typically create these formal communications to ensure their persistence in organizational memory, or do people actually value how these formats can shape the scope and the content of their exchanges?

Who defined the standard formats that are currently in use? Have there been both top down and bottom up sources of standardization?

How have these schemes evolved into their present states over time?

What improvements might your team envision to enhance the usefulness and clarity of existing formats?

What functionality concepts might you sketch to support workers as they seek to offload effort that would otherwise be needed to create, distribute, and interpret high volume and consistently formatted communications?

Where in your team’s models of work mediation might you identify new opportunities for valuable, largely automated standardization of communication outputs?

What flexibility might workers want in order to tailor standard communications to meet their local and situational goals? What options could allow them to informally annotate otherwise formal outputs?

Which contexts within your application concepts could valuably present clear and direct pathways for interactively creating defined communications?

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?