Every interface project begins with a question that is easy to skip and expensive to ignore: what exactly are we building, for whom, and within what limits? Project scope is the agreed boundary around your work. It states the goals the interface must achieve, the constraints you must design within (time, budget, team skills, device capabilities, accessibility and platform requirements), the users you are designing for, and the criteria that will tell you whether you succeeded. Without that boundary, teams drift, features multiply, and the final product satisfies no one in particular.
In this course, scoping is the step that makes the rest of Module 2 possible. You cannot sensibly compare mobile, web, and desktop platforms until you know what your users need to do, where they will do it, and what your project can realistically support. The formal project description you write is both a planning tool and a communication tool: it aligns your team, and later it gives you something concrete to evaluate your design against.
The three videos below approach scoping from different angles. As you watch, pay attention to how each one frames decisions: What questions get asked before design work starts? Who is in the room? How are goals separated from solutions? Where do constraints enter the conversation? Try to collect a short list of questions you could ask about your own project, and note any vocabulary (goals, requirements, deliverables, users, affordances) you can reuse when you write your scope document.
Nielsen Norman Group breaks the wide variety of UX workshop exercises down into seven foundational activities that underlie most of them. The video is likely to cover activities such as generating ideas, clarifying and organizing information, converging on decisions, and prioritizing — the kinds of structured group work teams use to agree on goals and boundaries early in a project. It is a short, practical overview rather than a deep dive into any single exercise.
Scoping is rarely a solo act, and this video from a widely respected UX research organization gives you a vocabulary for the collaborative activities that produce agreed goals, priorities, and constraints — directly supporting the "Identifying Project Goals" and "Defining Constraints" subtopics.
A practicing designer walks through an end-to-end web design process, from initial client contact and discovery through planning, design, and delivery, with a shared project template. Expect discussion of how requirements are gathered, how work is organized into phases, and how expectations are set with a client before design begins. The perspective is professional practice rather than academic theory.
It shows scoping in a real workflow — how goals, audience, deliverables, and limits get written down and communicated before any interface is built — which is a useful model for the "Writing a Formal Project Description" subtopic.
The Interaction Design Foundation explains affordances: the properties of an object or interface that signal what actions are possible, illustrated with concrete examples. The video is likely to connect affordances to user expectations and to how design choices communicate function without explicit instructions.
Affordances differ across platforms and user groups, so this concept helps you reason about target audience assumptions and platform constraints — the kind of thinking that turns a vague goal into a scoped, defensible design requirement.
Together these videos move from understanding users and their expectations to structuring team decisions to documenting a plan. The affordances video builds the user-centered reasoning behind MO1, since what an interface can plausibly afford depends on whether it runs on a phone, a browser, or a desktop. The workshop activities video supplies methods for surfacing goals, weighing options, and converging on a justified choice, which is the core skill behind MO2. The full design process video models how discovery, requirements, and deliverables get captured in writing, giving you a concrete reference as you draft the objectives, constraints, and success criteria required by MO3.
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.