Misusability Cases

Misusability Cases are scenarios which describe how design decisions may lead to usability problems subsequently leading to system misuse. These can be useful if you feel some aspect of a design might be open to exploitation, and you need to make a case for how the rationale design makes this possible.

Creating concept references

To create the evidence that forms the basis of your misusability case, you need to create one or more concept references. These can be based on personas, requirements, use cases, or other tasks. The functionality for creating, updating, or deleting concept references is accessible from the UX / Concept References menu, and procedures for working with concept references are very similar to those used for working with document references.

Creating the skeleton scenario

You need to create a task to encapsulate the misusability case scenario (or scenarios if these are specific to environment).

Creating task characteristics

Task characteristics form the basis of the argumentation model behind each misusability case. The functionality for creating, updating, or deleting task characteristics is accessible from the UX / Task Characteristics menu, and procedures for working with task characteristics are very similar to those used for working with persona characteristics.

View misusability case models

You can visualise misusability cases and their supporting argumentation models by selecting the Models / Misusability menu option, and selecting a misusability case to view.