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I would like to talk about resolving an important problem in the product team. The issue is that it takes too long to complete tasks. One of the reasons is that the level of elaboration is too deep. As if we have no time at all, and yet the functionality should be fully completed. The only thing remaining is to reduce the level of development. We decided to lower it not for all tasks, but only for some.

User scenarios in any product can be divided into three levels. Level one is scenarios that people use almost every day. We called such scenarios the main ones. The second is important, but not often necessary. These scenarios were called intermediate. The third is exceptions, these are just those scenarios that are usually completely forgotten.

Level 1

These are the most essential scenarios that the user uses every day. For example, searching for products in a store or reading news in a magazine. The development of such scenarios should be at the highest level. Here you need to spend time on checks and testing. Think through all the exceptions, make animations and hotkeys. Such scenarios are not numerous.

Level 2

These are important scenarios. But they are not often used. For example, profile settings. In such scenarios, you need to spend time on design and testing, but you can be more cool about mistakes. It makes no sense taking into account hotkeys. If some scenario ends up with an error, then it’s not as bad as in the first case. Someone says that this is why the car interior is made as comfortable as possible, compared to the engine compartment.

Level 3

Scenarios that are too popular among programmers. They can be ignored in the design. However, we must remember them, it need to be processed, but it should be done as simple as possible. For instance, imagine opening one page in two browser tabs and in one of them doing some action that changes the status of something else. And then you go to another one and do the same action, how should the system behave? Only the quality of the code depends on the ability to handle exceptions, but the success of the product is grounded on the first two levels.

Conclusion

No one needs a store with a perfectly thought-through scenario for adding a product to “Favorites” in two browser tabs, when the product search works poorly and is unclear.