🧭 Scenario · Make the call
The program that's bigger than the machine
The situation
A photo-editing program opens a giant image that, all together, would need 12 GB of memory. The laptop only has 8 GB of real RAM, with other apps already using some of it. You'd expect the program to refuse to open — but it opens fine and lets you edit, as long as you're working on one part of the image at a time. Only when you rapidly jump all over the whole image does everything slow to a crawl.
You haven't read about this exact system. That's the point — walk the three questions a designer asks: what's really wrong, what fixes it, and what does the fix cost?
1
Diagnose
Read past the story. What's the REAL problem — not what the feature does, but what's actually going wrong?
Look past the story. What's the REAL situation here?