What Happened to Scenario-Based Design in HCI?: A Scoping Review

Paper Title

What Happened to Scenario-Based Design in HCI?: A Scoping Review

Publication Info

• Topic area: Evolution and contemporary practices of Scenario-Based Design (SBD) in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
• Keywords: Scenario-Based Design, HCI, participatory design, speculative design, design methods, ethics, co-creation, narrative, usability, design futures.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Despite its long history, the evolution of Scenario-Based Design (SBD) in HCI over the past decade (2015–2025) has not been systematically reviewed, leaving gaps in understanding its current practices, methodological extensions, and relevance.
• Significance: Understanding the evolution of SBD is critical for advancing HCI design methods, ensuring they remain relevant, inclusive, and capable of addressing emerging challenges like ethics, speculative futures, and AI integration.
• Motivation and related work: SBD originated in the 1990s to address the limitations of traditional design methods by focusing on human-centered narratives. While prior work established SBD as a foundational HCI method, contemporary applications often overlook its roots and formal structures. This review aims to trace SBD’s evolution, focusing on its methodological adaptations and ongoing relevance.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A scoping review of SBD practices and methods in HCI, focusing on papers published in core ACM SIGCHI venues between 2015 and 2025.
• Novelty:
  1. Comprehensive analysis of 125 papers using SBD methods and 26 papers proposing SBD-extended methods.
  2. Identification of methodological adaptations categorized into four families: authorship, modality, design phase, and scope of inquiry.
  3. Development of a hierarchical framework to guide the selection of SBD techniques based on trade-offs in participant agency, resource requirements, and temporal scope.
  4. Proposal for a scenario and method repository to support systematic reuse and methodological transparency in the HCI community.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a scoping review using PRISMA-ScR guidelines.
  • Analyzed two corpora: (1) 125 papers employing SBD methods and (2) 26 papers proposing SBD-extended methods.
  • Categorized scenario creation practices into six primary themes, including user research, co-creation, and AI-generated scenarios.
  • Mapped SBD-extended methods into a hierarchical framework based on methodological levers and trade-offs.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 50.4% of papers grounded scenarios in academic sources; 20.8% used public/media sources; 12.8% involved co-creation with stakeholders.
  • SBD-extended methods were categorized into four families: authorship, modality, design phase, and scope of inquiry, each with trade-offs in participant agency, resource requirements, and temporal scope.
  • Use of AI-generated text in scenarios was observed in 3.2% of papers.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • The review highlights SBD’s adaptability to new challenges, such as speculative design and AI, while retaining its core focus on human-centered narratives.
  • Identifies gaps in methodological transparency and proposes infrastructure for systematic reuse.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Reviewed 370 papers from ACM SIGCHI venues, narrowing down to 125 SBD-focused papers and 26 family-tree papers.
  • Employed qualitative coding and hierarchical categorization to analyze scenario creation practices and method adaptations.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Focused on SIGCHI venues; future reviews should include other disciplines like architecture and mechanical engineering.
  • Limited to explicit mentions of SBD; further investigation into related narrative design methods, such as design fiction, is needed.

Summary

This scoping review examines the evolution of Scenario-Based Design (SBD) in HCI from 2015 to 2025, analyzing 125 papers using SBD methods and 26 papers proposing SBD-extended methods. It identifies six primary themes in scenario creation, including user research, co-creation, and AI-generated scenarios, and categorizes SBD-extended methods into four families: authorship, modality, design phase, and scope of inquiry. The study highlights SBD’s adaptability to new challenges, such as speculative design and AI, while proposing a hierarchical framework and a repository for systematic reuse. Future work should expand the scope to other disciplines and explore the intersection of SBD with design fiction and speculative design.