When John Lennon wrote ‘A Day In The Life’ in 1967, he wasn’t thinking about investor bankers working on a merger using the seamless nature of online collaboration, or a doctor in the 21st century getting e-alerts about new medication to her mobile phone. Of course he didn’t. He was preoccupied writing songs about Walruses and an Eggmen.

However, between 2001-02 I found myself working and visualising several scenarios that painted pictures of the world in two or three years time in the future. These ‘day in the life’ scenarios created a vision of how the end user’s life and job was made easier by the power of multi-channel applications. It was ‘user experience’ at a high level, showing the touch-points that pushed and pulled the user to interact with a system.

Looking back at these ‘day in the life’ scenarios, they feature some of the concepts that we have now become accustomed to on the internet such as personalised content, forums, subscriptions and e-alerts, team collaboration and document management. Back then these were new and cutting edge ideas that got clients excited.

I must admit that I am fond of these as they remind me of a time when I worked at Rubus in the Shaftesbury Avenue office. It was a company that had boundless optimism and a appetite for innovation. Typically we’d turn around a scenario in a few days if a couple of us worked on it , but that still involved long days hunched over a light box followed by hours of sequencing frames and transitions in good old trusty PowerPoint.

Creating the scenarios was much like writing a comic book, where you needed to craft a snappy storyline across a series of visually concise frames. Initially, we would produce ‘roughs’ of the frames. These frames would often consists of the user going about their business to a backdrop of something happening on-screen. One of us would focus on the characters and the storyboard while the other designer would work on the screens.  We’d always rope in someone in the office to feature in the scenario so as visual reference we’d take some snaps of them to posing at their computer or pretending to walk with a mobile phone glued to their ears. Yes, happy days.