Scenario-Oriented Specification (SOS): a design method for translating user scenarios into engineering specifications

Abstract

Modern interactive products require tighter integration between UX research and engineering design. However, the translation of scenario-based UX representations into engineering specifications is often informal, weakening traceability and making it harder to preserve the contextual rationale for technical decisions. We conceptualize this problem as the experience–specification gap: a representational discontinuity between experiential user scenarios and formal engineering representations. To address it, we develop Scenario-Oriented Specification (SOS), a five-step design method that structures translation from user scenarios to engineering specifications through linked artifacts anchored by persistent identifiers. SOS is grounded in five meta-requirements and three design principles. The method was evaluated through longitudinal enactment in an interdisciplinary industrial development project across 15 user scenarios and four predefined dimensions: practical enactability, output quality, process quality, and process efficiency. The results show that SOS supported traceable specification development while making under-specification and feasibility constraints explicit, and that a sixth step, spatial integration, emerged during enactment as an extension needed in this embodied product context. The study contributes to engineering design research by conceptualizing the experience–specification gap as a representational problem, introducing SOS as a reusable representational translation logic, and demonstrating a combined empirical and structural validation approach for evaluating design methods under realistic industrial conditions.